Zipping the Reader into Your Meat Suit
How to crush your 2025 writing goals with the carnal uncanny
This course is designed to ignite creativity by dissecting the “carnal uncanny,” a fusion of sacred carnality and defamiliarization. In our close reading sessions and in-class writing exercises, I'll encourage you to adopt techniques employed by a wide variety of accomplished writers and make them your own.
Discover the Carnal Uncanny through Sensory Writing
Ever felt that eerie, spine-tingling sensation when something familiar suddenly seems strange? That’s the carnal uncanny. It's when the human body is portrayed in ways that are both recognizable and bizarre, making us rethink what we know about ourselves. This concept shakes up our perception, sparking emotions from fascination to dread.
The body is the gateway to experiences of the uncanny. That’s why we’ll be engaging all five senses in your writing—especially those often overlooked like smell and taste. Mary Karr’s Sacred Carnality and Matthew Zapruder’s Make it Strange will be our touchstones as we delve into the rich, sensory world of the carnal uncanny. Unlock the power of forgotten memories with smell, as Christine Hyung Oak Lee does in her haunting piece “Mint.”
Master Defamiliarization
Seduce your readers with the strange on both the macro and micro levels:
Macro: Think Kafka’s vermin in "The Metamorphosis" or the ghost baby in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. We'll investigate how the strange, embodied premises of magical realism can alchemize abstraction and combat cliché.
Micro: We’ll analyze how language can evoke the uncanny. Sarah Rose Etter’s “The Spine” reimagines pain with surreal, incantatory precision. Todd Dillard’s synesthetic techniques in “The Widower’s Wife Takes Him to This Year’s Death Gala” will show you how to cross sensory wires for a haunting effect.
Explore Point of View, Uncanny Spaces, and Animated Inanimates
Experiment with unconventional points of view. Danielle Pafunda’s “The Dead Girls Speak in Unison” uses a chilling first-person plural voice, like a Greek chorus demanding revenge. This unique perspective reveals new layers of sensory and psychological experience. Step into worlds where the lines between the living and the dead blur. Lia Purpura’s morgue is part still-life, part grocery store of corpses. Unleash vivid imagery like Patricia Smith’s, where the inanimate—such as a pig’s body—takes on a disturbing vitality.
Play with Magical Realism and Extended Metaphor
Magical realism can heighten the carnal uncanny. In Roxane Gay’s “The Weight of Water” the protagonist’s power to summon rain acts as an extended metaphor for the wild eroticism within trauma and grief, highlighting the paradoxical nature of being special as both gift and curse. Kara Oakleaf’s “Gravity, Reduced” taps into global anxieties, with a world where gravity itself is forgotten, mirroring real-life chaos.
Why It Matters
Writing the carnal uncanny isn’t just about being different—it’s about creating a visceral, unforgettable experience for your readers. Avoid clichés, spark new perceptions, and bring your readers into your world with writing that feels alive and raw.
Imagine describing pain as Etter does: “A spine is a new home for needles, which navigate like hurt rockets through skin.” Or a concert while high on cough syrup like Lester Bangs: “The music begins… emitting urps and hissings and pings and swooshing in the dark…Yeah, let’s swim all the way out, through the jello into the limestone.”
Mary Karr puts it perfectly: an excellent carnal writer creates a “breathing, tasting avatar” that the reader can climb inside. That’s the magic we’ll be crafting together in our supportive community.
Join Us
I’m excited to help you create your own “meat suits,” whether they’re human, ghostly, monstrous, or something else entirely.
Expect to generate six new drafts through in-class exercises and refine one piece with peer and instructor feedback. Workshops will be structured to guide you toward polished work that resonates with readers.
Let’s push the boundaries of expression and plunge into the carnal uncanny together. Are you ready to transform your writing?
NEW CLASSES
January
1/12 Awaken Your Inner Word Witch: 8 Week Creative Writing Workshop with Writing Workshops Live on Zoom
1/30 The Carnal Uncanny: The Body and Beyond with Writing Co-Lab Live on Zoom
February
2/10 Word Witch: Exploring the Strange Magic of Embodiment online on Wet Ink
March
3/13 Writing the Weird: 4 Weeks, 4 Uncanny Creations with Writing Workshops Live on Zoom
3/16 The Haunted Muse: Trauma, Memory, Desire and the Art of Ghosts Live on Zoom