1 session, Saturday, February 10th, 12 pm - 2:00 pm EST
online
$50
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In her essay on “Place,” Dorothy Allison argues that rather than being limited to time or location, place is an embodiment of all elements of craft. “Place is people. Place is people with self-consciousness. Place is people with desire.” Swap sex for place and the same deal goes. As sexual beings, our locus of desire – and how we act/don’t act upon it – is rife with narrative opportunity. Sex can be perfunctory and it can be performative. Honest or dishonest, hot, cold. Together we will explore some of the enormous literary possibilities of sex: as place, character, emotion. Sex is action and pacing and subtext, sex is story advancement and internal thought, sex is dialogue and sex is metaphor, sex is implication and imperative, sex is conflict and sex is sensory detail, sex is where the heat lies, where the heart breaks, mind escapes, where the body empties and fills. We will look at examples (possible selections include Yoko Ogawa, James Salter, Deesha Philyaw, Justin Torres, Susan Minot, and more) before trying our hand at our own sex craft.
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About the instructor
Sara Lippmann is the author of the novel Lech and the story collections Doll Palace and Jerks. Her fiction has been honored by the New York Foundation for the Arts, and her essays have appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Catapult, The Lit Hub and elsewhere. With Seth Rogoff, she is co-editor of the anthology Smashing the Tablets: Radical Retellings of the Hebrew Bible forthcoming from SUNY Press. She is a founding member of the Writing Co-Lab, and lives with her family in Brooklyn.