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.
De-composed: 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.
Writing with Non-Monogamy
with Sam Amsler and Ruth Charnock
5-26th June
6-8pm (GMT, Zoom)
This session will be recorded and made available to all registrants.
How can writing undo monogamous ways of thinking, being, doing and relating? How is our writing constrained by calcified and normative forms, fears and fantasies about what writing should be and where it should go? Who and what are tied down and twisted by human-only imaginaries, the ‘marriage plot,’ the imperative of prescribed genres, normative happy endings, boring kinds of climax, delusions of linear time, single stories, coherent characters, and the terror of loose ends? How can we write in ways that are more faithful to our already abundant, complex but often invisible and excluded relational ecologies?
In ‘Writing with Non-monogamy,’ we’ll write through more capacious forms of relationality than are afforded to us by grammars of compulsory monogamy. We’re interested in queer kinds of commitment and the affordances of different forms and practices for non-monogamous writing: graphomania’s passion for proliferation; queer etymology’s intimacy with plurality, subversive/subsumed/lost/forgotten/denied/minor meanings, animism’s more-than-human, earth-and-cosmos-based, nonbinary, relational grammar and participants, and the disruptive connections of erotic forces and flows.
Who is this for?
This workshop is for writers and creatives of all persuasions at all levels of experience. You don’t need to know anything about non/monogamy to participate and this is not a how-to course. All welcome!
