$150.00
Session:
Friday, October 9, 2022
Time: 2-6pm EST (4 hours)
Description
Once you complete the payment process at our shop, you will receive an automatic confirmation from us. Your workshop instructor will then e-mail you to introduce themselves within 10 business days of the workshop start date with information and instructions for accessing the learning platform.
Making Your Payment: We accept payments by credit card and via PayPal.
Refund Policy: There is a cancellation fee of 15% included in each registration. Memoir Magazine will not issue a refund if a cancellation occurs after 48 hours of the class start time.
Memoir Magazine University cannot provide refunds, or transfer payments, for classes a student might miss, for any reason. Your instructor may be able to offer a makeup session for a recurring class.
Writing the Fat Body Into Being
Live Online Class:
Session:
Saturday, October 15, 2022
Time: 2-6pm EST (4 hours)
Note: The word “fat” has been reclaimed as a neutral/positive descriptor.
We all have bodies. We all eat food. We all have been indoctrinated into diet culture, starting at a young age, without our consent. This workshop, open to people of all body sizes and types, will focus on how to make visible our struggles with food and our bodies. Too often, we bring terror to the dinner table, fearing what the food we must consume to live will do to our bodies. Too often, we restrict and then binge–our body’s natural response to famine–and then we restrict some more. We look in the mirror and pinch our bellies, imagine cutting our fat with scissors. We won’t go to the beach, make love with the lights on, take pleasure in food, let ourselves wear the hot pants, the crop top, the bathing suit. Though many of us carry the wounds of diet culture inside of us, we often hide the story of those wounds.
This 4-hour online workshop, open to writers of all levels, will focus on telling our body stories. What is your relationship to food and your body? Were you bullied as a child due to your body size? How have diet culture and weight stigma shaped your interpersonal relationships? Have you experienced discrimination at a doctor’s office, in the workplace, even among your family and friends? Do you struggle with body image issues?
This workshop will also focus on embodied joy–all of the ways that we are reclaiming our bodies, letting ourselves experience the pleasures of whipped cream and cake, summer wind on bare bellies, dancing to Lizzo at a street party, lounging naked in bed with a book.
This will be a discussion-based, generative, supportive workshop that is open to all skill levels and all body sizes. Participants will leave having written one poem and one flash essay.
A 4-hour Online Class
Saturday, October 15, 2022
Time: 2-6pm EST (4 hours)
Fee: $150
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Instructor’s Bio:
Claudia Cortese’s book Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2017), which won Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Award for Emerging Poetry, explores girlhood, fat shaming, trauma. Cortese’s work has appeared in Bitch Magazine, Black Warrior Review, Blackbird, Crazyhorse, and Gulf Coast, among many others, and her poems have won awards from Baltimore Review, Mississippi Review, and RHINO Poetry. Her published essays examine the racism and homophobia of the disco sucks movement; weight stigma in medical settings during COVID-19; the history, pop culture representations, and embodied experiences of eating disorders, among other topics. She recently published a peer-reviewed article that analyzes the visual activism of book covers by fat-identifying poets. Cortese received a 2018 OUTstanding Faculty Ally of the Year certificate from the LGBTQ+ Center at Montclair State and is the Book Reviews Editor for Muzzle Magazine. In the Fall of 2021, she taught the first Fat Studies course that Montclair State has offered, Fat Studies: Race, Class, Gender, Queerness. The daughter of immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio’s Rust Belt and lives in New Jersey.
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