Here’s what we’re up to in July and August 2026:
This summer, writers at Louis Place have the opportunity to:
- learn and study in consecutive three-week workshops by returning guests Gabrielle Civil (July) and AX Mina (August);
- join 100-yard-dash: a temporary weekly group for writers using the summer as a writing sprint, facilitated by Steffani Jemison;
- participate in monthly opportunities to exchange pages with peers in the updated Project Exchange facilitated by Naima Lowe;
- join an ongoing weekly Trajectory writing group for support and feedback; and
- casually shoot the shit about website strategies, Substack, pedagogy, software stacks, and artist talks.
In the community at Louis Place, we welcome artists of all kinds who are ready to think, grow, and write in community.
We're publishing
novels and
newsletters and
nonfiction and
articles; we're
teaching and
learning; we're incubating and revising, speaking and listening, publishing and plotting, and we're doing it better, together 💕
Bring your morning pages, your newsletters, your song lyrics, your novel in progress, your flash fiction, your dream diary, your script, your score, your play, your memoir, your jokes, your essays, your talks, your teaching, your journal, your biggest and smallest ideas.
Welcome in—or welcome back.
Read on for more information about our Summer 2026 plans:
Guest workshops: Our generative writing workshops prioritize visionary, interdisciplinary thinkers from across the country. In Summer 2026, we're thrilled to welcome Gabrielle Civil and AX Mina for two complementary three-week workshops designed to support reflection and renewal (Ritual Poetics), and creative production (AX Mina).
Ritual Poetics by Gabrielle Civil
Thursdays, July 9, 16, and 23 at 7pm ET / 4pm PT
Preparation for ritual is ritual . . . In this workshop, we will prepare ourselves for writing as ceremony. We will explore the role of spirit, incantation, chant, rite, and gesture in our creative practice. Inspired by Jayne Cortez, Sonia Louise Taylor, Steffani Jemison, Selah Saterstrom, Sawako Nakayasu, Petra Kuppers, Maya Deren, Arthur Rickydoc Flowers, and more, we will mine ritual touchstones in our own lives and invite new liturgies and scores. Paying close attention to the work of Ntozake Shange, Akilah Oliver, and Leslie Scalapino, we will enact writing as embodied practice on and off the page.
Workshop (title TBA) by AX Mina
Tuesdays August 4th, 11th, and 18th at 7pm ET / 4pm PT
Our Spring 2026 Artist Publishing Practicum star is back by popular demand! AX Mina is a creative consultant, leadership coach, author and artist who thinks about the future of work, technology, media and society. She is a current Senior Civic Media Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication and previously led operations at Meedan, a global technology non-profit. Mina is author of
Memes to Movements: How the World’s Most Viral Media is Changing Social Protest and Power (Beacon Press) and digital editor for Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters (MIT Press). Her newest book,
The Hanmoji Handbook, is co-authored for MITeen Press about emoji and the Chinese language.
Writers in our community also have access to recordings and notes from past sessions by Jonathan Gonzelez, Benedict Nguyen, Leila Abdelrazaq, Nat Raha, Annelise Chen, Quincy Flowers, Morgan Bassichis, Tisa Bryant, Daniel Alexander Jones, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Cori Olinghouse, Ashon Crawley, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Lara Mimosa Montes, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Johanna Hedva and others.
Daily writing: We write together for an hour, twice every day (8-9am and 12-1pm ET, Monday through Sunday). This fall, we are also offering evening sessions Sunday-Thursday at 9pm ET.
Not everyone can join us every day. Some of our writers don’t participate in daily writing at all. For others, quiet daily cowriting is an important anchor. During monthly writing retreats, the Daily writing room is open all day. In Summer 2026, writing retreats—with prompts and encouragement—are lovingly hosted by
Jessica Harvey.
Need a reader? Facilitated by Naima Lowe, Project Exchange is back for Summer 2026! Project Exchange is a monthly opportunity to exchange pages, ideas, or creative work for feedback with writers in the community. Submit pages for exchange mid-month; meet with your partner to discuss later in the month. Project Exchange is designed for writers who need more or different feedback than they can find in weekly Trajectory sessions (e.g. a second reader on that grant application or fiction submission), as well as for writers who can't commit to weekly sessions.
We
shoot the shit occasionally...strategizing about software, residency applications, chitchatting about articles we've recently read, just hanging out. In recent sessions, we’ve talked about popular education, when to lawyer up, navigating boycotts and solidarity strategies, sharing our successful fellowship applications, and much more. This summer, we'll be shooting the shit about:
- Radical Pedagogies—For folks interested in fomenting and fostering learning spaces; for people who are interested in teaching workshops and classes, designing curricula and syllabi. Join us to develop and receive feedback on workshops / classes / syallabi / curricula in process and share resources about pedagogical approaches, participatory methodologies, processes. Meeting twice this summer—and perhaps forming the seed of a new Trajectory launching this fall!
- Substack strategies—Case studies and tips featuring two veteran newsletter writers in our community
- Websites—Squarespace? Cargo? Tertulia? What software are we using for our websites in 2026? How are we structuring our sites? How do we balance websites with social media and newsletters?
- Back to school software stack—Zotero, Obsidian, Notion, Bear, Craft, oh my! — bring us your problems & show us your stack.
- Artist talks—Let's share best practices, ideas, favorite examples, etc. for effective and generative artist talks.
Looking for a creative group for feedback / feed forward / accountability? About half of us link up with small groups—we call these Trajectory. All groups are interdisciplinary and include a mix of writers from different backgrounds.
Some Trajectories are supported by our team of Community Liaisons—stewards who help anchor Trajectory groups and keep them running smoothly. Current groups include:
- Hybrid Forms
-
Non-Fiction-Ish
-
Book Length Projects
-
Poetic Forms
-
Prompt Romp(t)
-
Close Encounters
We’re pleased to present this special offering for Summer 2026:
100-yard-dash: cross-genre writing lab
Tuesdays, 4pm ET / 1pm PT, July 7 - August 18, 2026
A weekly group for writers using the summer as a production sprint. Designed for writers producing pages in any genre: expect targeted craft inspiration, writing prompts, and shared accountability. You'll be able to share short snippets of your work (head to Project Exchange or your regular Trajectory for extended feedback). Facilitated by Steffani Jemison.
Note that
this offering is limited to summer 2026.
In addition,
we share prompts and reflections from writers, articles, and events discussed in the community. In Summer 2026, new prompts are offered on Thursdays at noon in special write-along Daily writing sessions facilitated by community liaisons Jessica and Kristen. Writers in the community also have access to our library of hundreds of writing prompts, including follow-along video prompts.