Read My World en Uitgeverij Chaos presenteren de schrijfworkshop Dagboek als feministisch genre.

About the workshops

Adrienne Rich refers to the journal as “that profoundly female, and feminist genre,” for the diary, as feminism, questions and makes connections between previously hidden aspects of life. In this series we take the affinities of diary writing and feminism as a starting point to experiment with different genres in/as the diary. Six feminist writers and thinkers will guide you through their own research and offer writing prompts.

Each workshop is its own individual moment of doing so and can be joined separately or through signing up for the entire series, in which case it becomes a writing course with the opportunity to receive feedback and workshop texts together with the initiator of this series: Emma van Meyeren

Before each session you will receive a reader with texts that inspire the session, designed by Rietland Women’s Office. 

Emma van Meyeren is a writer and DJ based in Amsterdam. In 2020 Uitgeverij Chaos published a collection of her essays on grief titled Ook ik ben stukgewaaid.

NOTE: this workshop series is bilingual Dutch/English. The main language of each session is the language it is described in. For participation in the whole series basic reading/listening in both languages is advised. If this raises any questions please reach out.

Link to tickets for entire series: https://tickets.voordemensen.nl/readmyworld/iframes/116

Dates:
20.03: Love Tokens: On Romantic Gesture and Its Restricted Objects (Romy Day Winkel)
03.04: Kathy Acker, het lichaam en plagiaat (Tessel Veneboer)
17.04: Ghost Stories and the Invisible (Leana Boven)
08.05: Demystificatie van het zelf: schrijven door bestaan (Grâce Ndjako)
22.05: TBA TBA TBA (Fiep van Bodegom)
05.06: Mary Kelly: Women’s Work as Artist’s Work (Mia You)

2-4 P.M. CET, Online

Find all info on the sessions on emmavanmeyeren.com
Link to tickets for separate workshops: https://tickets.voordemensen.nl/readmyworld/iframes/108

Illustration by Aura Lydon.

  • 20 maart: Romy Day Winkel

    Love Tokens: On Romantic Gesture and Its Restricted Objects

    In this workshop, Romy Day Winkel invites you to join her in making a love token, and to use this object as a starting point for your personal reflections on romance (in all its guises). Through a short reading of the history of this gesture, you will be asked to enter a guided room-walk in search of a romantic object in your everyday surroundings. You will then work with your found material, think and talk about ways to imitate their meaning, to figure out what happens when you don’t just write about, but with and through an object.

    Romy Day Winkel is a writer, researcher and musician based in Amsterdam. Her research on romance as a locus for revolutionary longing is expanding via the Critical Studies program at Sandberg Institute, as well as her digital archive (IG @romance_utopia) and radio show. She also runs a socialist feminist zine called SNAKY ZINE and interviews poets for Perdu’s podcast series.

    Tickets
  • 3 april: Tessel Veneboer

    Kathy Acker, het lichaam en plagiaat

    De Amerikaanse auteur Kathy Acker (1947-1997) schreef experimentele literatuur waarin ze de instabiliteit van identiteit blootlegt. Haar werk is hyperpersoonlijk maar niet strikt autobiografisch: fictie en werkelijkheid zijn in haar werk moeilijk te onderscheiden. Zo schreef ze bijvoorbeeld ‘fake autobiography’ en plagieerde teksten van anderen. Acker probeerde een taal te vinden waarmee ze het lichaam aanwezig kon maken in de tekst. Lichamelijkheid, gevoelens, politiek, seks: bij Acker komt het allemaal samen. Aan de hand van haar vroege werk “Section from Diary” (1971) zullen we twee van haar schrijftechnieken toepassen op de dagboekvorm: het kopiëren van anderen (plagiaat) en het creëren van lichamelijkheid in de tekst.

    Tessel Veneboer is als promovenda verbonden aan de vakgroep Engelse letterkunde van de Universiteit Gent. Daar houdt ze zich bezig met queer theorie en onderzoekt de rol van seksualiteit in experimentele literatuur. Haar literatuurkritiek en korte verhalen zijn onder andere verschenen bij De Nederlandse Boekengids, deBuren en nY.

    Tickets
  • 17 april: Leana Boven

    Ghost Stories and the Invisible

    Ghosts are embodiments of what we are scared of and cannot fully grasp, as well as beings that are made invisible, supposedly not present in our “real” world. They are embodiments of the social, created by human imagination, and do not just appear out of nowhere. The shadows that follow us are also shadows of ourselves. This workshop departs from Avery Gordon’s understanding of Ghostly Matters: “to be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects.” By looking at current queer/feminist ghost stories such as the work of Carmen Maria Machado we will consider how the ghostly can be used to understand the unseen influences of our daily lives. How the scary things that haunt us, those echoes, murmurs and shadows, connect our present to our past.

    Leana Boven is a curator, program maker and researcher from Rotterdam. She works with the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons and created the exhibition ‘On Collective Care and Togetherness’ at MAMA in 2020. She is interested in queer, feminist and decolonial critiques.

    Tickets
  • 8 mei: Grâce Ndjako

    Demystificatie van het zelf: schrijven door bestaan

    In deze workshop staan we stil bij het werk van Anna J. Cooper en Simone de Beauvoir. Zowel Cooper als de Beauvoir schrijven over het bestaan als ‘ander’, en het moeten strijden tegen een beeld dat anderen hebben gecreëerd. We zullen o.a Beauvoir’s ideëen over de mythe bespreken, en de manier waarop deze het bestaan ontkend. We zullen daarna de subjectieve en fenomenologische benaderingen van Cooper en Beauvoir in het beschrijven van hun doorleefde ervaring bespreken.

    Grâce Ndjako is schrijver en docent filosofie aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam. Haar werk verscheen onder andere in de bundel Afrolit (Dipsaus, 2020), de Nederlandse Boekengids, Lilith Magazine en Hard//hoofd.

    Tickets
  • 22 mei: Fiep van Bodegom

    To be announced!

    Tickets
  • 5 juni: Mia You

    Mary Kelly: Women’s Work as Artist’s Work

    Lucy Lippard describes Mary Kelly’s 1970s documentary project Post-partum Document – which was conceptualized both as installation and as a book – as a “portrait of the mother’s own emergence into sexuality, language and self-identity in a patriarchal world, paralleling the ‘other’ experience of the same phenomena by her male child.” Through collecting, transcribing and translating her child’s dirty diapers, first words, and scribbling, Kelly searches for language that makes legible the role of social reproduction within capitalism. In this session, we will work across objects, images and texts to document and decipher the unspoken labor imposed upon us versus that which we willingly offer.

    Mia You is a writer and scholar currently teaching in the English Language and Culture program at Utrecht University and in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Institute. She is author of the poetry collections I, Too, Dislike It (1913 Press, 2016) and Objective Practice (Achiote Press, 2007), and other writing has appeared in Artforum,

    Ticket