4-Week: Cities, Flowers, and Dogs—Writing Non-Human Characters

As human beings, our lives are enriched, challenged, supported, and expanded by our entanglements with other intelligences. So are our stories. But how do we write forms of consciousness that we've never inhabited ourselves? And where is the line between "human" and "non-human," anyway? This four-week course will invite writers to think adventurously about how to reach across the gulf of vast difference and speculate on what it might be like to perceive reality through non-human minds. We'll try out generative writing exercises to help us stretch into alternate forms of awareness and reflect upon the complexity and interconnectedness of real and imagined worlds. As we go, we'll learn from N.K. Jemisin's sentient cityscapes, Dino Enrique Piacentini's watchful plant life, Eileen Myles's charismatic and devoted pit bull, and Ursula K. Le Guin's anthropological excursions into all sorts of alien intelligences. Speculative storytellers, realist fiction writers, and memoirists of interspecies relationships are welcome to join in.