Magic Words

When: Saturday, August 29, 2026, 1-3pm PT / Where: Hella Plants HQ, Oakland, for the Bathers Library Summer Symposium 

In this installment for of an ongoing, occasional, workshop exploring the many possible crossroads where writing meets magic, we’ll focus on how meaning emerges from, with, centered on, and returning to, individual words. In conversation with examples of how individual words gather power in a variety of contexts–in dictionaries and lists, poems and stories, early modern emblems and alchemical illustrations, modern tarot and oracle decks, captions, slogans, and musical refrains–we’ll work on excavating our own individual, magical, lexicons: the words that want us to write into them. What do they want us to know? 

Discover Creative Nonfiction

When: Wednesdays, September 23-October 21, 2026, 6:30-9pm PT / Where: The Writing Salon, San Francisco

In this 5-week class, through in-class discussions, generative writing, and light feedback on one another’s work, we’ll play our way through the essayist’s toolkit. We’ll animate scenes from memory through dialogue and narration, create portraits of others, and practice observation and reflection as we describe objects and places. For guidance, we’ll read works of creative nonfiction, paying attention to the craft and formal decisions each author makes to shape real-life material. Class meetings will be intimate and collaborative, centered on our experiences as writers. By the end of 5 weeks, you’ll have generated the building blocks for a fully realized essay-in-miniature (1,000 words or less) in one of the following forms: portrait, memoir, a braided essay or essay in fragments, or another form of your own borrowing or innovation. You’ll also come away with a broader sense of what creative nonfiction can do, and where you want to go next as a writer.

Discover Poetry

When: Wednesdays, October 28-December 2, 2026, 6:30-9pm PT / Where: The Writing Salon, San Francisco

In this intro to poetry, we’ll play our way into poems by writing down what’s been communicating itself to us, especially that stuff we don’t yet understand, what experiences have made us feel most chilled, on fire, or alive. Drawing on examples from poets old and new, we’ll learn tactics for tempering, forming, and sharing this emotional core. We’ll practice gathering sense impressions, observations, and images, and reflecting on big feelings from the safety of tranquility, or at least, some distance. We’ll see what happens to our voice when we write as a ‘speaker’ or when we write towards someone real or imagined as an ‘addressee.’ And we’ll go wild with form and formlessness, seeing what happens when we apply the constraints of particular shapes to our thoughts, feelings, and language, and what happens when we let go of those forms or tear them apart. And you’ll walk away from class with a portfolio of 3-5 poems pulled from our work together, a kit of poet’s tools, and a backlog of prompts to carry your explorations onward.