a four week writing/ reading class
4 Tuesday nights 7-9 PM ET March 11, 18, 25, April 1, 2025 with time to write in between
“poetry is always for the people and it is always a time of war.” – June Jordan.
description:/ the tl:dr details Are you fem(me) and writing in genocidal yet resistant times? Is your writing (wanting to be) a sharpened knife, a true blurry lens, a question complication, a dirge, a demand, horny, monstrous, mourning? do you wanna write hard & read writers who are same? hard femme poetics is for you!
details:
- 4 week once a week writing classes, Tuesdays, March 11, 18, 25, April 1, 2025 7-9 PM ET.
- for anyone who wants to read poems/ hybrid work out of a femme canon I made up of the monstrous demand question liturgy mean story unexpected kiss, and write some.
- sliding scale rates of $80-500 USD for a month’s classes, payment plans available, some free spots. pay more if you have access to wealth/ money, less if you don’t and/or have other stuff going on. (more info about what sliding scale is and some different ways of thinking about it and where you might fall on it here and here.
- text based format with CART, once a week kitchen table write and read together with captions and access.
- space is limited. centers femme people or people with some relationship to fem(me) who live at multiple margins ie BIPOC, not-cis, working class/ poor, disabled, fat, sex working, migrant.
- what is femme? what I say is! KIDDING. but femme is a multiverse of possibility and I wrote a definition question of it that I think still holds up, here. one thing it sure isn’t is all white abled skinny cis ladies. not sure if you fit the bill? email me.
- go here and fill out this form to apply.
- please email llpsx@proton.me with questions or if the form above is not accessible for you and I will send you a word version of it.
the backstory: hard femme poetics is an online reading/ writing class I used to teach in the middle 20teens, a class for queer femme people majority BIPOC who wanted to read writing by femme writers and write our own and consider what femme lineages or traditions of writing might be. I took a break for a while because I got too busy and also had to figure out some neurodivergence access things for teaching online, but I taught a one off for Workshops for Gaza in December 2024, loved it and decided to bring it back.
what is the goal/ why this class now: I want to create a space for people to read shit and think and talk/ write critically about it, and to write and generate new material, try some things out, play/ experiment, fail.
when I was teaching the one off of this class for Workshops for Gaza the organizer shared how they didn’t just created WFG as a fundraiser, it was also to create teaching/ learning spaces outside of the academy which has never been super great and is increasingly impossible to operate in because of censorship stemming from fascism and zionism. teaching and learning as a free space has been all I’ve ever wanted to create as a teacher and experience as a student so here we go.
as of february 2025 I feel like we’re watching everything fall the fuck down and combust and just going to work and do these things we do feels pretty nuts and impossible. I still have to go to work and pay bills but I also had a check in with myself about how i wanted to spend my spoons and my one wild precious life and what I wanted my legacy to be and one thing I answered with was I love teaching and I want to do it. this isn’t just about me- I think a lot of people are having a similar what the fuck am I doing with my life” moment and wanting to return to writing in this time.
FINALLY at the december class there was a moment where I was like, wow it’s nice to be in a loosely fem(me( centered space, this almost feels… old school. from around 06-2017ish in my life there were a lot of online and in person fem(me) spaces that operated separate from “butch/femme” but were a bunch of kinds of fem(me)s with a grip of different identities within the femme multiverse talking and hanging out and creating culture and trying to figure shit out. those spaces were deeply imperfect, often but not always yt and cis dominated, but/ and some of them that were multiracial and trans/nonbinary/ multigender were really important to me. I’ve always been a fem who fucked with other fems first who has also been a weird uncle bitch and also fem in a brown disabled way.
I’m glad some of the aspects of those spaces that were shit crumbled away, or maybe they still exist but i don’t fuck with them so i don’t know where they are. an intimate said earlier this year “remember fem4fem like 2012 style?” and I’m like yeah it was great but it sucked how there was that assumption everyone was cis or even inadvertently fell into the binarism of you could either be ken or barbie but not both or neither or something else entirely. but i think there’s still a need for space that is wide and broad fem(me) space to talk about and play with this shit, and I want to help create some.
is this class just for femmes? do i count? so I like the idea of having a class that’s centered around folks who id’ as fem(me) some kind of way but this is not the white cis abled barbie femme class, this is the monster weirdo garbage femme gender centered class (you don’t have to id as monster garbage as gender, I’m just giving a sense of the terroir.) also i have a long term relationship with the term hard femme bc I am a working class young gen xer from the rust belt and I like it as a title but there is not a lit ‘hard femme only” class, I will not make you pull a knife out of your boots in order to join. so yeah if you are femme sometimes or all the time or some kind of way or you maybe don’t know your gender but you’re interested, apply!
if you’re I AM MASC JUST MASC NOT FEMME ID’D AT ALL BUT I WORSHIP FEMMES AND WANT TO HAVE A DATE OR STARE AT Y’ALL, maybe don’t register. 😉
but i’m not a writer/ do i count, am I a “real writer”/ do i need an mfa/ i no, you don’t need an mfa or a pedigree or have a list of fancy workshops you’ve gone to to be here. I know a lot of us fought our way into those places- that’s great. but this is a low/ no barrier course and I am aiming it at folks who in fact do not have institutional support or the long fancy writers ish on a cv. what I care about is that you take yourself, the work and the space seriously and write hard.
the og description circa 2017:
In this writing workshop by and for femmes at the margins, we will read writing by a wide variety of femme writers, storytellers and creators and write poetry and prose on femme ancestors, communities, bodies, lives, homes, sexualities, relationships and survival. Born out of my love for femmes and femme writing and thinking and organizing and world-making, and my desire to say fuck you to every gender studies course that just talks about masculinity, we will study writing- poetry, prose, memoir, theory and hybrid works by queer femmes thriving, surviving and gifting genius at multiple margins. This workshop is open to folks who identify as queer femmes, across the gender spectrum, and centers Black, Indigenous and/or of color/disabled/trans, intersex and gender nonconforming/fat/sex working/ poor and working class/ currently or formerly incarcerated/older and younger and otherwise marginalized femmes.
