Write Like An Animal with Gayle Brandeis

Tap into the inspiration of the animal world to write your most potent, authentic work.

Your Instructor: Gayle Brandeis, author of Many Restless Concerns

Where: Online — Available everywhere!

When: This class is not currently enrolling. To be notified when it is offered again, Click Here

Enrollment: 16

Price: $199

Class Description

Do you want to write with the muscularity of a leaping gazelle, the grace of a flouncing jellyfish, the joy of a bird riding a pillar of warm air?

Write Like an Animal is for anyone who wants to write in a way that is fierce and wild and true to your own nature. In this class, we’ll find our way into words that warm our blood, that get our heart pumping, that make us feel fully alive. Animals can teach us so much as writers—about stalking ideas, about building homes for our words, about moving through our stories and poems with command and fluidity and deep authenticity.

Write Like an Animal will combine facts about animal behavior with meditations on the creative process and innovative creative writing exercises, offering a fresh spin on the field of biomimicry, in which engineers takes design cues from the natural world—studying the way kingfishers enter the water without a splash in order to make bullet trains quieter, for instance, or taking inspiration from the scalloped edges of whale flippers to make wind turbines more effective. As writers, we too can be moved by the elegance and power of the animal world and, through its example, start to access our own most potent, authentic expression.

What This Class Covers

WEEK 1—FIND YOUR INNER ANIMAL

This week, we’ll look at animal presence—how non-human animals are fully alive and alert inside their skin—and how we can start to become similarly embodied and awake as writers. We’ll also explore animal senses and how we can use them to spark our own sensory awareness and writing.

There will be a lecture and several generative writing prompts for this week.

WEEK 2—PLAY AND POUNCE

This week, we’ll look at the play behavior of animals and how we can translate it into being more playful in our writing. We’ll also look at how animals prowl and attack, and see how we can use this as inspiration to fearlessly pounce at the page.

There will be a lecture and several generative writing prompts for this week. Students will turn in up to 5 pages of their writing for critique.

Goals Of This Class

  • Approach your writing in a fresh, embodied way.
  • Produce new work in the genre of your choice.
  • Feel more alive inside your skin and on the page.
  • Gather new tools for future inspiration beyond the class.
  • Get your work critiqued by a published, acclaimed author.
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