Exile Punk

When: Weekly on Saturday, October 5-November 9, 11am-1pm. Where: The live class meets in Northampton, MA. The online section will operate through the Operating System and does not meet at a specific time. Who: Zoe Tuck is a queer transgender poet based in Northampton, MA. Author of Terror Matrix and Soft Investigations, co-curator of the But Also reading series, she offers poetry workshops and other services such as literary publicity and marketing, small press consultation, tarot readings, and more. A former member of the editorial collectives of Timeless, Infinite Light and of Hold: A Journal, she also continues to be available for editing services and manuscript consultation. She is currently working on building the Threshold Academy, an experiment in radical pedagogy and a future bookstore + alternative educational space, in Western Massachusetts. Find out more at zoetuck.com. Cost: $125 Exile Punk is a class designed to help you explore and express your aesthetics and politics, by reading then inhabiting several literary forms and practices: memorization, transcription, translation, manifestos, and forming a personal literary canon. You will be doing this modeled on Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s 2018 novel Call Me Zebra, a bildungsroman (coming of age story) whose protagonist does all of the above and more. The name Exile Punk gestures to the premise of Call Me Zebra: Zebra is a refugee from Iran. Exile: her life—and relationship to literature—are shaped in conversation with a larger body of refugee and exile literature. Punk: Zebra “anarchist, atheist, autodidact” is the proud inheritor of her family’s radical politics. This is a hybrid seminar and workshop, based on the premise that creative writing emerges best from an atmosphere of engaged reading. Some words on the structure: this class is organized around the five sections of Call Me Zebra. Each week-long unit will focus on a particular theme which we will explore together, first through selected readings, then through writing exercises. You will keep a reading diary in which you record your reactions to the readings. This can also function as a “commonplace book” in which you transcribe passages that stood out.