Description

THE WORKSHOP

Seeding your neurononcompliant writing practice

A generative multi-genre workshop for envisioning neurononcompliance on the page and in your life

I use the term “neurononcompliance” rather than “neurodivergent” or “neurodiverse” in order to emphasize our  inherent disobedience to neurotypicality and the typical systems of harm created to that end. While there is something inherent to how our bodyminds sense, think, and create, neurononcompliant writing, like all liberation practices, requires commitment to unlearning oppressive neurocompliant behaviors, patterns, and ways of relating. 

I approach neurononcompliance from anti-colonial and mad liberation frameworks. Many of us have lost our ways of being, sensing, and knowing both at the level of losing our languages and ways of relating to colonization and imperialism, but also at the level of these ways of being, sensing, and becoming criminalizable,  incarcerable, institutionalizable, and/or the justifications for why we as neurononcompliant, colonized writers cannot/must not/should not write or be read with any seriousness.

Neurononcompliant writers are seers, visionaries. We see where and how the world could be better, and often, just how easily the world could become better. We see just how we are meant to create in this world but often, early neurocompliant conditioning, unmet access needs and basic needs, and self-policing prevent us from creating authentically.

 In developing workshops specifically for neurononcompliants based in anti-colonial and mad liberation frameworks, I hope to help neurononcompliant writers rediscover their unique strengths as artists and thinkers.  The strengths we might have buried in our struggles to hide our neurodivergence, chronic illness, disablement, and difference. 

This workshop will be a space for you to work through the ways you might censor yourself in your writing. It will be a space to silence your inner neurotypical critic. It will be a space to play with different forms and genres on the page, and write into neurononcompliant world building.

WHEN & WHERE

Friday & Saturday Nov 15 & 16 from 6-8 PM MST 

The workshop will take place virtually via Zoom. Upon registration, you will be sent the link closer to the event.

REGISTRATION

To bring poetry to the people, we are offering our workshops on a donation basis.

To support our Tiny Resident, we recommend a $25-50 sliding donation.

That said, please feel welcome to pay any amount that you can!

All funds will be used to support Tiny Spoon’s Tiny Residency Program.

MEET YOUR WORKSHOP LEAD

hanta t. samsa (he/hanta) is a transgenre poet and writer who situates his work in a genealogy of disability poetics, ecopoetics, transpoetics, and post-colonial futurisms. he holds an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College and an MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. his writing appears or in Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Salt Hill Journal and smoke and mold, sometimes under his dead name. hanta is a LAMBDA Emerging Voices Fellow and a recipient of the inaugural Appalachian Futurism Queer Arts Liberation grant. his chapbook, Transcolonial Poem, was awarded second place in the MAYDAY Poetry Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming from New American Press.