Mischief & Tricks

with Johanna Hedva

a 3-session online workshop over Zoom: Wednesdays July 3rd, 10th, and 17th from 4-6PM Pacific / 7-9PM Eastern
(recordings of each meeting will be available in case you need to miss one)

Imagine stories without tricksters, unreliable narrators, plot twists, red herrings, two-faced heralds, disguises and spies, liars and cons, shapeshifters, doppelgängers, clowns, drag queens, troublemakers, and rapscallions. How boring! These animate stories like nothing else. They deviate, kink, aberrate, and veer. They get lost, they stay lost, they erase the breadcrumb trail, they sneak us through portals to places not here, slip us past the guards at the gate. They thwart expectations, challenge presumptions and stereotypes, and bring us to questions rather than answers.

At their core, they reveal the fact that nothing is stable. Immutability, changelessness—do these exist at all? What does the fact of the shapeshifter articulate about our conceptions of truth, authenticity, identity, meaning? What are we reaching for when we reach for stability, for a form to be permanent, rigid, invariable? And what delight, what surprise, what new kinds of knowledges can come, when we reach for that and it’s not there?

In this class, we will work with mischief and tricks as strategies for storytelling and building characters. Each class will be structured around a theme: 1) Unreliable Narrators, Liars, Cons; 2) Shapeshifters, Personae, Doppelgängers, Drag; and 3) Genre Tricks, Plot Twists, Red Herrings. For each of these, there will be a short lecture, with suggested readings and films, as well as writing exercises that excavate the theme. In class, there will be time to discuss the readings, as well as share and critique writing we’ve generated through the exercises.

The aim of the class is to have fun, laugh, explore, be delighted and pleasantly surprised, follow our curiosity, and breathe unexpected life onto the page. We’ll experiment with automatic writing exercises, we’ll mess around with AI, we’ll play games. If you’d like to show up in class wearing a disguise, mask, costume, some form of drag—please do!

(Author photo of Hedva by Ian Byers-Gamber, images made by Hedva with AI)

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Pricing:

The following payment model is inspired by and borrowed from the payment model of Bayo Akomolafe’s class, We Will Dance With Mountains: Into the Cracks.

This workshop offers a sliding scale based on your relative financial standing. In an effort to reflect disparity in economic condition and access to wealth, the following payment system is designed for those with more wealth to help cover the costs of those with less access to wealth and resources. We trust your discernment of your current financial situation and how you fit into the global economic context.

As you decide what amount to pay, please consider your present-day financial situation governed by income, but also the following factors: historical discrimination faced by your peoples; your financial wealth (retirement/savings/investments); your access to income and financial wealth, both current and anticipated (how easily could you earn more income compared to other people in your community, country, and the world; are you expecting an inheritance); people counting on your financial livelihood including dependents and community members; the socio-economic conditions of your locale (relative to other places in your country and in the world); your relationship to food & resource scarcity.

$500 Partner

$450 Supporter (Note: This amount reflects the “real” value of this course.)

$375 Companion

$250 Friend

Scholarships are also still available for anyone needing further financial assistance. Please email Daniel at registration@corporealwriting.com for more info, or if you are feeling challenged in any way by the financial requirements of participation.

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Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the novel Your Love Is Not Good, which Kirkus called a “hellraising, resplendent must read,” and the novel On Hell, which was named one of Dennis Cooper’s favorites of 2018. They are also the author of Minerva the Miscarriage of the Brain, which collects a decade of work in poetry, plays, performances, and essays. Their artwork has been shown internationally, and their albums are Black Moon Lilith in Pisces in the 4th House and The Sun and The Moon. Their writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, frieze, The White Review, Topical Cream, Spike, Die Zeit, and is anthologized in Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art. Their essay “Sick Woman Theory,” published in 2016, has been translated into 11 languages. Their essay collection How To Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom will be published in September 2024, by Hillman Grad Books.