Welcome to at Louis Place
(a liberatory community for writers)
︎︎︎
We are writers, artists, activists, and dreamers who hold each other accountable through shared writing practice.
About us
We are a community of generous readers and writers sharing ideas, listening to each other, studying together, learning from one another, and taking each other seriously. We are writing glossaries, short stories, screenplays, guides, essays, ghost stories, poems, morning pages, memoirs, syllabi, haiku, artist statements, journals, notes, fellowship applications, plays, sorrow songs, proposals.
What we do:
Quiet daily co-writing
8-9 am & 2-3 pm EST Monday through Sunday
Weekly small group cohorts
for support and feedback / feed forward (we call these Trajectory)
Writing workshops
for inspiration and advice. Fall 2022 guests include Daniel Alexander Jones, Sahra Motalebi, and Gabrielle Civil.
Page exchange
with other writers in the community, facilitated monthly
Library of writing prompts & reflections
from readings and proposals that surface in the community—with new additions every week.
Informal gathering around shared interests
Strategizing about research software, residency applications. Also just hanging out.
Monthly writing retreats
we write together all day.
8-9 am & 2-3 pm EST Monday through Sunday
Weekly small group cohorts
for support and feedback / feed forward (we call these Trajectory)
Writing workshops
for inspiration and advice. Fall 2022 guests include Daniel Alexander Jones, Sahra Motalebi, and Gabrielle Civil.
Page exchange
with other writers in the community, facilitated monthly
Library of writing prompts & reflections
from readings and proposals that surface in the community—with new additions every week.
Informal gathering around shared interests
Strategizing about research software, residency applications. Also just hanging out.
Monthly writing retreats
we write together all day.
Yes, at Louis Place is for you if:
✌🏾 You seek nonhierarchical, interdisciplinary, intergenerational intellectual exchange
✌🏾 You write or think meaningfully about writing in relation to your creative work
✌🏾 You want to be in comfortable, private, and drama-free conversation with ambitious writers (editors, playwrights, scholars, performers, artists, curators, activists) from around the world. We are in the cities and states currently known as Lima, Austin, Chicago, Mexico City, Oklahoma City, Brooklyn, New Haven, Washington DC, Cincinnati, Harlem, New Jersey, Atlanta, and more.
✌🏾 You prioritize Black voices & revolutionary dreams
✌🏾 You want to share ideas and feedback and frustrations with other writers.
✌🏾 You are willing to give as much as you receive from a community.
✌🏾 You write or think meaningfully about writing in relation to your creative work
✌🏾 You want to be in comfortable, private, and drama-free conversation with ambitious writers (editors, playwrights, scholars, performers, artists, curators, activists) from around the world. We are in the cities and states currently known as Lima, Austin, Chicago, Mexico City, Oklahoma City, Brooklyn, New Haven, Washington DC, Cincinnati, Harlem, New Jersey, Atlanta, and more.
✌🏾 You prioritize Black voices & revolutionary dreams
✌🏾 You want to share ideas and feedback and frustrations with other writers.
✌🏾 You are willing to give as much as you receive from a community.
Want to talk to a person? Request a chat.
What’s on—
At Louis Place is a community for writers. All activities are open to every writer in our community. Here’s a selection:
We write together for an hour or two every day (8-9am and 2-3pm ET every day, Monday through Sunday). 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, with somatic sessions led by a special guest. Writing retreats are lovingly hosted by Quincy Flowers.
Need a reader? Facilitated by Naima Lowe, Page Exchange is a monthly opportunity to exchange pages for feedback with writers in the community. Submit pages for exchange mid-month; meet with your partner to share feedback later in the month. For writers who need more or different feedback than they can find in weekly Trajectory sessions, or 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. This fall, we'll be hosting a community salon and open mic and a conversation about the “somatic turn” in art and academe, among others.
About half of us link up with small groups—we call these Trajectory—for “workshop,” for accountability, or a little bit of each. All groups are interdisciplinary and include a mix of writers from different backgrounds.
Beginning this fall, some Trajectories will be supported by our newly expanded team of Community Liaisons—stewards who help anchor Trajectory groups and keep them running smoothly. Current groups include:
- Large-Scale Writing Projects (for writers working on books, chapbooks, and scripts)
- Poetry Club (writing poems)
- Close Encounters (renewing our connection to creative work through generative writing and discussion)
- Weird Scripts (for experiments in performance)
- Fiction Workshop (for novelists and short story writers)
We create roundups of prompts and reflections from writers, articles, and events discussed in the community. We’ve got hundreds so far, including new follow-along video prompts.
Workshops at Louis Place are generative and horizontal—thinking/writing aloud and alongside our mentors and guides. We're thrilled to preview our fall workshop season.
On November 3, 2022, “artist-as-energy-worker” Daniel Alexander Jones will lead a session with the community at Louis Place. Jones' joyous “wildflower body of original work" is in conversation with essay, songwriting, theater, teaching, and performance art contexts and communities. Jones has received more awards than we could possibly list, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Artists Fellowship, a TED Fellowship, and many more; his work has been commissioned by the Public Theater, SoHo Rep, and other venues.
On November 16, 2022, performance artist and author Gabrielle Civil will lead a session inspired by her latest performance memoir the déjà vu. Focusing on “formal and ancestral repetition,” the workshop will feature open-ended prompts to help generate new writing about (or as) doubling, haunting, flashbacks, premonitions and more. Civil is a black feminist performance artist and author whose writing has appeared in Small Axe, Obsidian, Asterix, Rain Taxi, and other publications.
On December 1, 2022, we welcome writer and friend of the community at Louis Place Sahra Motalebi for a special workshop focusing on voice and breath. Sahra writes, “Our voices are lifelong companions, unfolding as infinite subjective processes—those of our material and corporeal realities, but also of unbounded imaginal and intuitive zones. Accessing these processes together we discover our voice-streams and those of others. We generate “techniques” for vocalization in real-time, over days and years, as we find our own prompts, diagrams, drawings, and songs." Motalebi's voice sculptures, set paintings, performances, and “future relics” have been presented at/by the Whitney Biennial, Swiss Institute, The Kitchen, National Sawdust, and more. Writers in our community also have access to recordings and notes from past sessions by Quincy Flowers, Anjuli Raza Kolb, Cori Olinghouse, Ashon Crawley, Mayra Rodríguez Castro, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, and other guests.
Want more?
I’m ready to write at Louis Place.
at Louis Place is accepting new writers through September 21, 2022.
Step 1: First up: complete a short form that collects information about your access needs, your current time zone, and your writing goals. The form also describes our sliding scale contribution philosophy and our community compass. Don’t worry, no writing sample required.
Step 2: After you submit, give us time to read your materials; we’ll send you a personal response with your next steps.
Step 3: Check out. You will receive your checkout instructions via email.
Step 4: You’ll receive an email with a special link to access together.atlouisplace.com.
I’d like to learn more.
Not quite ready? You have a few options.
︎ If you have questions, we’re happy to chat with you via Zoom or email to figure out whether at Louis Place is right for you. Start the process by registering your interest (follow the ‘sign up’ link above) or sending us a note.
We’re hosting an information session for writers who are curious about whether we’re a good fit on Monday, September 19, 2022. Register for the information session here.
︎ In the meantime, join our mailing list below or check out our Instagram.
