SPRING 2023 // TRANSMISSIONS
What the Four Queens of the Tarot Have to Say About Vocation
– with Selah
In a conventional deck of tarot cards there are four queens: the Queen of Cups, the Queen of Swords, the Queen of Pentacles, and the Queen of Wands. In this gathering we’ll move through each of their shimmering archives to see what they have to say about vocation. As always, the Queens will bring ideas, strategies, paradigms, advice and notebook prompts. No knowledge of tarot required.
SUNDAY 2/19 // 6-7PM (MT)
$10
REGISTER HERE
No Ma$ters: Creative Sovereignty & Self-Publishing
–
with JT
This class will share reflections and processes for developing a practice of creative sovereignty and autonomy-- particularly through the mode of independent or self-publishing. I will share and discuss models and resources for writers thinking of producing and publishing their work on their own terms.
SUNDAY 3/12 // 6-7PM (MT)
$10
REGISTER HERE
Always poetry, always play
– with Ebs
For those who must sell their labor to survive, contending with the need to self-produce to create writing can feel like an exploitation of the self. Play disrupts the logics of capitalism. Where and how can we play? Is there room for play when things are very bleak? What is play? What does it have to do with poetry? Together we'll consider these questions, as well as the communal and enlivening nature of play, language, and poetry.
SUNDAY 3/26 // 6-7PM (MT)
$10
REGISTER HERE
Most of us are not able to support ourselves materially through what we would consider our “calling” (an idea that doesn’t recognize the inequities and issues of access shaped by capitalism, racism, and ableism). Lacking a single “vocation” we may cobble together our livelihood through many sources. Yet our various forms of labor (domestic, manual, intellectual, repetitive, unacknowledged, under-compensated) can serve as a lens for our own artistic and poetic development. In addition to intersections of labor and the creative process, in this class we will also consider the root of vocation: to call.
Who
are we calling out to in our work? What is the nature of our call? Through what forms & technologies are we able to be heard? How does the larger “work” of living echo in even our most nascent writing stages? Together we’ll explore how these relationships inform our creative projects. Open genre.
6 WEEKS; SUNDAYS // March 19 - April 30* 12-2pm (MT)
*we will not be meeting 4/23
$180-360
REGISTER HERE
Wealth Redistribution / Scholarships / Trade:
Donations in-excess of the market price for a given course help subsidize costs for participants experiencing economic hardship, creating greater access. If you have wealth to redistribute, please consider doing so.
Scholarship positions available for QTPOC writers. Number dependent on overall course enrollment.
VP is open to trade and barter. Reach out with specific inquiries.
What does it mean to make sense in a poem? What does it mean to mean something? Does it have to make sense to have meaning? We will explore techniques for gathering the many skirts of your long poems— endurance building, connecting disparate thematic threads— to arrive at personal writing strategies. If you enjoy writers such as Eileen Myles, Larry Levis, Ariana Reines, and Bernadette Mayer, this class will be an opportunity to refine your process and consider how meaning and narrative are key (or not!) to the marathon of writing a long poem.
SUNDAY 4/9 // 6-7PM (MT)
$10
REGISTER HERE
What is made possible by focusing our attention on the singular? We will explore core concepts of mindfulness using sacred Buddhist texts, poetry, and ritual. Together we will explore five worldly elements (void, air, earth, fire, and water) as they are expressed interconnectedly between objects and ourselves. Time will be provided for meditation practice as well as for writing in response to prompts designed to facilitate a guided meditation (or poem or short prose piece). No experience with meditation is needed.
SUNDAY 4/23 // 6-8PM (MT)
$20
REGISTER HERE
a class for good troublemakers to join a choral body, an orchestral pit, where lone voices can go to transubstantiate into sounding the whole. this generative class will write after playful plagiarists and devise schemes and cells for troubling the notion of authorship. class will culminate in a co-authored document that celebrates the death of the byline, records disorder, and commemorates the event of writing collectively, our roving masthead, which will never be again.
SUNDAY 5/14 // 6-8PM (MT)
$20
REGISTER HERE
This offering will attempt to explore the notions, intersections, contradictions, and paradoxes of utopia, the enclosures of language, revolutionary poetics, and a/the communist project. Together we'll consider these questions: How do we prepare ourselves for a new world? Can poetry help, and how does it exist after a new world? What can we ask of poetry?
SUNDAY 6/4 // 6-7PM (MT)
$10
REGISTER HERE