Exploring the Sexual (Self) in Writing — Workshop with Carley Moore

Event Details: Tuesday, May 28, 2019, 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm Neighborhood Preservation Center (232 E 11th St, New York, NY 10003) 5 Sessions - 5/28, 6/4, 6/11, 6/18, 6/25

If you are like me as a reader and writer, you like everything to be in the text—art, books, movies, cartoons, video games, grocery shopping, shit, pee, garbage, kids, pets, lovers, friends, family, poverty, wealth, porn, pills, walking, not walking, work, sleep, and sex, especially sex. But how do we write our sexual selves no matter what genre or across genres? What happens to essayists who write about fucking as opposed to novelists? What about poets? What if genre is irrelevant? What if the sex is queer, kinky, disabled, brown, black and/or read as marginalized in some way? Who gets to decide such things? What if it’s straight? Tender? Rough? Loving? Painful? Solo? Joyous? How do we work within and outside of our histories to write what a piece asks of us? I imagine some of these (and more!) questions might come up as we read and write together to create sexual selves, scenes, language, lines, paragraphs, and characters on the page.

We’ll probably read (and this might change depending on class desires and time): Anna Castillo, Melissa Febos, Audre Lorde, Sandra Gail Lambert, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Henry Miller, Eileen Myles, Tommy Pico, Khadijah Queen, Arielle Bywater Simone, Gertrude Stein, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Simone White, Jillian Weise, David Wojnarowicz, and Jenny Zhang. We might also watch some movie clips (The Favourite, The Duke of Burgundy, and Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot) and videos by Janelle Monae, Peaches, Junglepussy, and Prince.

Carley Moore

Carley Moore is an essayist, novelist, and poet. 16 Pills, her debut collection of essays was published by Tinderbox Edition in 2018.  Her debut novel, The Not Wives, is forthcoming from the Feminist Press in the fall of 2019.  In 2017, she published her first poetry chapbook, Portal Poem (Dancing Girl Press) and in 2012, she published a young adult novel, The Stalker Chronicles (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Recent essays, interviews, and poems have appeared in Aster(ix), The American Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The L.A. Review of Books, LitHub, and VIDA: Women in Literary Arts.  Her work has been nominated for two Pushcarts Prizes and a LAMBDA award.  She teaches at NYU and Bard College.