Sunday February 4 * 2pm * REGISTER

Never stare down a blank page again. In this workshop you will learn techniques–cultivated over years of studying and teaching improvisational performance–that can be applied to any narrative art form including comics, short stories, novels, scripts, and more. Using group games and individual assignments, we will strengthen our ability to generate ideas and learn to avoid the obstacles that tend to get in our way. If you are stuck in your current project or just looking for new ways to exercise your creative muscles, this is for you. Materials provided: notebooks and pens.

Zach Mason (Takoma Park, MD) is a writer, director, illustrator, and musician who has created comics, zines, stage shows, short films, and performance art. His most recent play–Betty Blum (1937-1979)–was staged at The Flea in New York City. For more information see: https://www.emotionaldistance.com/about/

Saturday September 30 * market opens 5:30, music at 7 * TICKETS

Celebrate the release of DC music & art zine PaperJam’s fifth issue on Saturday, August 26th at Rhizome. There will be music inside - Faunas, Same Heads, Adriana-Lucia Cotes, and Drivel - and an art/zine market outside. Market opens at 5:30 pm, Show 7:00 pm. Tickets are $10. 

PaperJam is a paper zine and online resource hub for the DC DIY music community. PaperJam connects artists and fans with new music, interviews, art, writing, events, and actions to support DC DIY culture. PaperJam launched in March 2021 as a way to document the music scene's experience and response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and to create a safe space for DC music culture to exist when gathering together in physical music spaces was not possible. Inspired by the DC Zine Archive, Paperjam aims to continue the tradition of the DC DIY subculture documenting itself. 

Thursday July 6 * 7pm * TICKETS

Join us for a book talk and public conversation led by Cisco Bradley, followed by music from Baltimore duo Pwisans Ete'nel.

Cisco Bradley's new book, The Williamsburg Avant-Garde: Experimental Music and Sound on the Brooklyn Waterfront (Duke University Press, 2023), covers the underground, experimental, and improvised music scene there between the late 1980s and the early 2010s. The book portrays an entire community and all that they were able to create, while also dealing with gentrification and other forms of marginalization through that time. Cisco Bradley is a history professor at the Pratt Institute and the editor of Jazz Right Now, an online publication and archive that has illuminated much of the scene covered in the book.

Pwisans Ete'nel is a duo comprised of two of Baltimore’s leading artist, multi-instrumentalist Jamal Moore and Bashi Rose (Film and Percussion). Their aim is to journey into the spiritual abyss channeling ancestral roots through music. “If the music is not played with pure intention from the heart and soul, then what is it worth,” asks Bashi Rose. Together they will be bringing in new sonic chemistry of sound via composition and heavy improvisational synergy.

"Write Your Own Obit Workshop"

with Sarah (founder of Death Positive DC and end-of-life doula)

Contact Sarah at sarah@deathpositivedc.com for more information

Monday, Dec. 3rd * 630-830 pm * $10

**We will start promptly at 630**

Pre-registration is required. (Space is limited to 16 people.)

Tea/juice and lights snacks will be provided

Please bring a journal and pen or a laptop or other device you can write on

Wifi is available

During the workshop, we will:

-Learn about the history of obits and the current state of obits

-Share and read fun, moving, or unique obits. If you want to bring an obit to share, please do!

-Write our own obits (I'll provides some guided writing exercises as well as time for free writing)

-Rewrite our obits (optional -- what do we wish they said?)

-Share our obits/rewritten obits and discuss how writing our own obit helps us reflect on our lives and our legacies and perhaps inspire us to reprioritize our lives in an effort to live more fully. Can we hold on to these obits for a year (or more) and revisit them as a way to see how we have changed? Sharing is always optional!

Thursdays 7-930pm Nov. 8, 15, 29, Dec. 6, 13 (skip Thanksgiving week) * $75 * REGISTER

Dreams show us what we haven’t been able to express in words or images in waking life. Attending to dreams opens us to intuition, our own unrecognized thoughts and feelings, and the symbolic mode of thought. But each morning most of us forget the riveting scenes we’ve encountered in the night. In losing our dreams, we lose touch with the deepest sources of creativity, and the “royal road,” as Freud said, to the understanding of our own motivations and choices in life.

This workshop can guide you on the first steps on that road. Even if you never remember your dreams, you can easily master a few simple tricks to catch them before they fly away, and establish a practice for keeping a dream journal, exploring your dreams, and drawing upon them to bring the inner life to creative expression. Participants will share dreams, using a gentle, non-intrusive method for unlocking the metaphors that structure dreams. Along with contemporary theories and ancient cultural traditions, we will study dreams empirically and experientially, trying out techniques for deepening insights, drawing on modern psychology, ancient and diverse cultural traditions, and practical exercises for artists.

Consistent attendance will create a secure space for dream-sharing and help establish your dream-journal practice.

Bernard Welt has taught dream studies courses at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George Washington University and at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He is the co-author, with Phil King and Kelly Bulkeley, of Dreaming in the Classroom: Practices, Methods, and Resources in Dream Education (State University Press of New York), the first major academic study of the use of dreams in education. A former member of the board of directors of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, he is a widely-recognized authority on dreaming and its relation to cinema. He is also the author of Mythomania: Fantasies, Fables, and Sheer Lies in Contemporary American Popular Art, and of poetry in many journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry.

Join us for our monthly poetry fuddle to play around with words in this casual and inventive meetup. Local poets Amy Eisner and Leslie Bumstead will offer a poetry activity to get everyone writing — or bring your own to share with the group. You don't have to be a poet to participate; you can just enjoy fuddling around. Bring an idea, refreshments, or nothing at all.

Ready to RSVP? Befuddled? Contact amyeisner@gmail.com or lbumstead@mac.com

In this 6-week workshop we will employ various experiments and practices to generate innovative poetry. Our aim is to uncover the unexpected — to bypass habitual thinking and writing in favor of language that will surprise us and lead us into new creative territory.

We'll explore everything from cut-ups to experimental memoir. We'll do homophonic translations, erasures, and hybrid compositions. You will also make up your own experiments and constraints. For context, guidance, and ideas, we'll read the work of poets Joe Brainard, Lyn Hejinian, Harryette Mullen, and Leslie Scalapino, among others.

This workshop anyone interested in exploring the possibilities of language and generating new material. We will spend some time sharing our work (if desired) but most of the time we will be writing/experimenting. No experience necessary!

How well does your writing habit fit in your daily life? When you suddenly find you have some free time, are you ready to write?

Poems That Happen is a workflow process for poets who want to streamline their practice and write effectively within the context of a busy life of work, etc.

Organized around three core principles -- modularity, portability, and scalability -- and four stages of action -- capture, transcribe, clarify, and publish -- PTH is a creative bootstrap that counters writer’s block and creates a sense of forward momentum.

Buck will talk about his experience in developing PTH and demonstrate examples of each stage. Poems That Happen is recommended for anyone who finds they have no time to write, or who struggle to write when they do find the time.

Buck Downs is a poet and executive writing coach in Washington, D.C. His Latest Book is Unintended Empire, forthcoming from Furniture Press Books.

Please join us on Wednesday April 18th as legendary guitarist David Grubbs will be reading from his new book, Now that the Audience is Assembled and playing solo electric guitar.

Following his investigation into experimental music and sound recording in Records Ruin the Landscape, David Grubbs turns his attention to the live performance of improvised music with an altogether different form of writing. Now that the audience is assembled is a book-length prose poem that describes a fictional musical performance during which an unnamed musician improvises the construction of a series of invented instruments before an audience that is alternately contemplative, participatory, disputatious, and asleep. Over the course of this phantasmagorical all-night concert, repeated interruptions take the form of in-depth discussions and musical demonstrations. Both a work of literature and a study of music, Now that the audience is assembled explores the categories of improvised music, solo performance, text scores, instrument building, aesthetic deskilling and reskilling, and the odd fate of the composer in experimental music.

Supporting set by a fierce crew of local improvisers assembled for the occasion, including Layne Garrett, Jim Ryan, Sarah Schaffer, and Nate Scheible.

Join us for our monthly poetry fuddle to play around with words in this casual and inventive meetup. Local poets Amy Eisner and Leslie Bumstead will offer a poetry activity to get everyone writing — or bring your own to share with the group. You don't have to be a poet to participate; you can just enjoy fuddling around. Bring an idea, refreshments, or nothing at all.

Ready to RSVP? Befuddled? Contact amyeisner@gmail.com or lbumstead@mac.com

An evening of cross-genre, experimental, hybrid and anti-genre literature. Please join Action Books, Calamari Press, Per Second Press, and Tarpaulin Sky Press at Rhizome on February 11th for readings featuring Nat Baldwin, Claire Donato, Johannes Göransson, Elizabeth Hall, Brandon Hobson, Robert Lopez, Vi Khi Nao, Julie Reverb, Joanna Ruocco, Abe Smith, Aaron Apps, and Valerie Hsiung.

Be part of a national wave of spoken word, poetry, and storytelling with Writers Resist, a day writers all over America are having open readings to speak out for democracy and social justice. All ages, all styles, all languages, all welcome. Bring your friends and get your turn at the mic. “History has its eyes on you!”

Experimental Writing Lab returns with more experiments with words, this time with a focus on poetry. Join us as we pursue creative writing through experiment and chance. We will explore various methods including cut-ups, erasures, collage, homophonic translations, and concrete poetry.