Welcome to Mommy’s El Camino.

The following is a reformatted and rearranged collage of fragments from different syllabi and teaching notes that I’ve generated over the years. Classes were taught/facilitated at: the Fine Arts Work Center, UCLA Extension, Idyllwild Arts, a local high school, Cal Arts, Corporeal Writing, and one workshop I didn’t end up teaching in 2020 due to the emergence of the pandemic.

what is your medicine (psyche, body)

what is your “poison”

how do these affect your body

how do you write about these (if you do)

what books, authors, films, art makes you feel “in your body”—why/how

do any of your other practices impact your body—how

(art practices, sports, music)

how does a piece of writing enter your body

--freewrite about what “territories” you inhabit and how this shapes who you are as a poet/writer, as a person at your age

--freewrite on the concept of “states”—as in, what state do you normally live in (emotionally, metaphysically, metaphorically…)? What states have you traversed?

--what risks do you avoid

--what risks do you seek out

--what are some good conditions for you for taking a risk?

--what risks have you taken here?

--what risk do you still want to take here?

how do you avoid your body

how do you engage it

how do you inhabit it

HOW CAN YOU IMAGINE USING PUBLIC NOTEBOOKS?

--what is your idea?  why would it benefit from being a public notebook first? how might you benefit process-wise?

--what is the scariest way you can imagine? in other words, what might you need to try using to push your learning edge?

when do you “forget” you have a body

what are some of your “altered states”

why would we want to write more into the body

Joan Didion’s migraine

body journals

how do you integrate/not integrate a piece of writing

where do you feel it in your body

how do you begin to describe it

if you were a museum, what rooms would we enter? where are the exits? what’s for sale in the gift shop? Extend this metaphor as you see fit.

if your writing is a metaphoric “house,” what rooms are inside? What is the environment like? What is “working” in this house? What needs to be attended to in this house?

meditation

energy work

“out of body” experiences

“liminal” experiences

Do we mean personal, political, or both?

How and when did you first become politicized?

Where are your politics (emphasis on the lowercase “p”) located historically, culturally, personally?

How can this be transmitted in ways that engage, surprise, and transform readers?

the actual body

bodies in relationship

structures: law, race, workplace, clothing, academia, culture

rooms, houses, buildings, streets, cities, natural settings, territories

states, continents, Earth

--where are you at right now?

--what are you excited about?

--where do you feel neutral? dread? excitement?

other questions:

my books are waiting to be read by you