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?

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