Intensive Hybridity Workshop with Chris Campanioni (via Zoom)

“Every life is the defense of a form,” wrote Susan Sontag in her notebook in March, 1979. “Form is the defense of every marginalized life,” I wrote in my notebook in February, 2017. Hybridity is the salve & salvo for those of us who have been marginalized, who exist in the margins, who exist in the middle & on the edges, halfway between two points, at the intersection of categories & labels, race & ethnicity & gender, an expression of the isolation & alienation of non-binary, non-normative, mixed race bodies. What better way to empower our neo-mestizo experience than to re-present it through the liminal frame of the hybrid, cross-genre text? When I re-trained my own eyes how to see myself from outside myself, I began the long work in re-teaching myself how to write.

May all our accountings be irregular. May all our lives be in defense of form: our own blood & breath, breath & flesh. May we always defend our form; may our form always defend us from the hierarchies of genre & all of its generic expectations. A great deal has to be given up if you are going to succeed in creating a generative work of art, unless what might be given up is taken away from you. Unless what is taken away from you is your voice. If reading your writing is a way out of exile, writing toward a new way of reading is a method to engender empathy, dismantle conventional narrative, undo silencing.

Objective: To straddle the line between poetry & prose, essay & narrative, list & analysis. I’d like to think of the hybrid form as a map, an itinerary, an index, a choreographed movement that allows one to move between text & context, past & present, meaning & making—& moreover, the moment of making. On the fly. In this one-day workshop, we’ll learn to embody the liminal hybrid form by embracing our own liminal, intertextual, fluid, often performative, identities. Let’s locate ourselves on this map & re-present our way of seeing; our way of being in the world.In doing so, we’ll think about our own work in relation to the markers of lineation, prose poetry, the essay, & the list, not to form distinctions but to fulfill the synthesis of genre, the generic, & the generative. We’ll arrive in class ready to discuss ways in which we can integrate all of these markers in a piece, connect seemingly disparate moments & ideas, & leave with a great work-in-process.

This class will be held via Zoom. You will receive the Zoom link at the time of signup and again in the day prior to class. Please check spam filters and write to admin@writerscenter.org with questions.

Chris Campanioni’s latest book is A and B and Also Nothing (Otis Books | Seismicity Editions, 2020). Recent work has appeared in BOMB, Catapult, Fence, American Poetry Review, Nat. Brut, Poetry International, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Denver Quarterly, and has been translated into Spanish and Portuguese. He is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets College Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Pushcart Prize. The film ad­aptation of his hybrid piece “This body’s long (& I’m still loading)” was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival in 2017. His multimedia work has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art and staged at the &Now Festival of Innovative Writing, and his research on queer migration, surveillance, and the personal text has been presented internationally. Chris teaches at Pace University and Baruch College, where he has been awarded the Diana Colbert Prize for Innovative Teaching, the Presidential Excellence Award for Distinguished Teaching, and the Department of English Excellence in Teaching Award. He edits PANK, publishes PANK Books, and lives in Brooklyn.