Beyond Form is a home for writers and writing practices that are experimental, don’t fit or are devalued elsewhere.
We believe that how we relate to form (human and more than) impacts our power to create, disrupt domination and experience different realities, and that playing with and queering form is a practice of liberation.
What we believe
What we do
We offer online workshops and courses, study and practice cohorts and mentoring programs that widen what’s possible for and in our writing.
Hermit Crabs as Queer Forms
with Jessica Wright
7-28th May
6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)
All readings and writing prompts will be made available prior to the sessions, together with short recordings.
Hermit crabs are born without their own containers. Famously, they adopt or steal their exoskeletons. In literature, hermit crabs are narratives that inhabit borrowed documentary forms, such as maths tests and rejection letters.
Hermit crabs are often autobiographical, the form acting as a protective shell for vulnerable material. They are considered a kind of essay.
Hermit crab essays challenge expectations about what a narrative is and what it ought to look like, what a document should communicate, and how to interpret a text’s signals. By definition, the hermit crab form is one of mimicry and/or thievery, of incompleteness, of making novel and provisional homes.
Yet hermit crabs themselves sometimes take homes by force, and indeed they appear separately in literary tradition as a figure for white writers using narrative tropes from indigenous traditions in colonised countries. Then there’s the way that their binary of hard shell/soft underbelly replicates cis-heteronormative structures and stories.
In this way, hermit crabs gesture to some of the complexities and contradictions of queerness. They point to the importance of recursive and critical self-reflection on our strategies for connecting and compromising and borrowing and building. They ask us what structures we need or rely on or make do with in our efforts toward freedom.
How do we relate to the containers and structures we live with(in)? How do they change us, and how do we change them? What contradictions come to light when we examine the ways we seek to make home?
This four-week course offers space and provocation to write into these questions through a focus on hermit crab essays and their limits & possibilities as queer forms.
Week 1 – vulnerability
During the first week, we will get familiar with hermit crab essays as a means of protection when writing about vulnerable topics.
Week 2 – performance and cultural critique
Kazim Ali suggests we ‘take genre itself as a form of drag’. This week, we will try our hand at hermit crabs as performances that play with and subvert textual norms.
Week 3 – homing devices
What does it mean to make a home? How is home linked to freedom (and freedom for whom)? Considering critiques of hermit crab essays, we will explore different ways of making and understanding home in our work.
Week 4 – turning inward and outward
Revising hermit crab essays for other readers involves meditating on the joins between narrative and form. This week, we will deepen our understanding of our work and ourselves in order to prepare our essays for the outside world.
This course is intended as a lower cost option. The standard sliding scale is £10/£60/£120/£200. If you can afford to pay above the £10 option, please do so to help with our costs. If none of these payment options are possible for you, please email info@beyondformcreativewriting.org.
Image by Ahmed Sobah via Upslash
Decomposed: writing with narrative shape and embodied practice
with Char Heather
3-24th June
5-7pm (GMT, Zoom)
This session will be recorded and made available to all registrants.
What does it mean to write in circles? To compose a story of fractals or roots? To spin a yarn that truly spirals? In this course you will be asked to stray from one of the most well-trodden paths through narrative, the arc, and instead, be invited to think about how you can incorporate other shapes into your narratives, informed by your individual embodied experience.
Each week we will discuss the potential of various shapes, how they might reflect or compliment your embodied experience and writing process, and how we might tangibly write using these forms.
We will look to queer and crip theory alongside contemporary writers who are experimenting with narrative forms, such as Renee Gladman, Zoe Wicomb and Jen Calleja, to inform our discussions and the writing we do both in and out of class.
Sessions will be made up of discussion, short readings and writing exercises, with optional reading and writing for you to do outside of class if and when you would like to. Together, we'll think through waves and spirals, knots and networks. You'll be asked to bring shapes that you are interested in to the first session to inform the rest of the course, with the aim that you will leave with a variety of approaches you can take forward into your writing projects.
