we the soil: May 2025
workshops in June/July 2025; plus, an audio interview with Jasmine Barnes & Shivani Gupta about In Surreal Life & creative community
Dear readers & makers,
This month (but a day late! my bad!), I offer you a 30-minute interview with Jasmine Barnes and Shivani Gupta, the current In Surreal Life Fellows who serve as guides in the In Surreal Life experience.
In Surreal Life is a nourishing creative experience founded by writer, musician, and visual artist Shira Erlichman. Ummm, somehow we didn’t mention Shira during this entire interview, which is so ridiculous. We all dearly love Shira, and I have even been lucky to work with Shira one-on-one, which I highly recommend. Every In Surreal Life (ISL) experience includes a Visiting Artist Call with Shira, which is always a banger. She is generous with her brilliance.
Shivani, Jasmine, and I talked about the magic of creating in community (Why does it feel so good? Why does it help so much?!) while weaving in details about the ISL experience and what ISL consistently gets right when it comes to connection, care, and creativity within each cohort and beyond.
Please have a listen. You can also read the transcript here. Then, check out the details about In Surreal Life at the top of this month’s list of workshops coming up this summer.
upcoming workshops
below, you will find a listing of workshops taking place in June/July 2025. you can always submit a workshop for next month’s newsletter using this Workshop Submission Form.
In Surreal Life with Shira Erlichman + Visiting Artists
This month-long experience includes 31 daily prompts, the opportunity to meet regularly with a small core group to discuss your writing, six whole group calls (including four Visiting Artist calls), and access to a Slack channel for more community-building. July's Visiting Artists are Chet’la Sebree, Patrycja Humienik, Angel Nafis (BIPOC Group Only), and Sarah Kay.
When: July 2025
Where: Online
Payment: Sliding Scale, $350 - $450 ; 12 Surreal Scholarships available for BIPOC artists
What We Carry: Writing in Contrapuntal Form with Talicha J.
This is a two-week poetry workshop focused on layered poems that hold tension, memory, contradiction, and grief—each two-hour session includes reading, writing, and space to explore what form can carry.
When: Wednesdays, June 11 & June 18 (two sessions) | 8:00 - 10:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: Sliding Scale, $10 - $60
Solar Year: An Orbit for Your Book with emily brandt
This is not a workshop, it’s a generative, communal force.
Using the framework of the SOLAR YEAR, our creative orbit starts with peak fire energy near the upcoming summer solstice. We’ll meet every four weeks (13 sessions total, one 6 week mid-winter break) to support the collective progress (and, if desired, completion) of your book-length project. All media & genres welcome. We’ll primarily be referring to poetry texts, but our first two cohorts included poets, essayists, fiction-writers, journalists, photographers, sci-fi writers, scholars, and memoirists.
When: Wednesdays, June 18, 2025 - June 3, 2026 (13 sessions) | 7:00 - 8:45pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: Sliding Scale, $525 - $975
A Method to the Madness: Messing in Forms with Javeria Hasnain
Ever written something on the page and wondered if it's poetry? What makes a poem a poem?
This is a beginner-friendly, four-week, generative writing workshop for someone who has never dabbled in poetry; wants to learn more about craft and form; and seeks a structure for the chaos of one's own mind. Each week, we will focus on a specific form of poetry: sonnet, ghazal, duplex, and pantoum. We will learn the elements of form; read poets who have used form successfully to achieve the purpose of their work; then purposefully strayed away from form and its limitations. Students can expect to read and write weekly. Our reading materials will consist of craft essays and poems. Our in-class sessions will be prompt-based and students can expect to leave with a packet of poems consisting of at least one sonnet, one ghazal, one duplex, and one pantoum.
When: Synchronous classes on Wednesdays, May 28, June 11, June 25, & July 9 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm EST (in addition to an asynchronous component)
When: Saturdays, June 7 - June 28, 2025 (four sessions) | 11:00am - 1:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $475
Intermediate/Advanced Creative Writing in Spanish with Mil Mundos
This is for intermediate and advanced students who would like to put their Spanish writing skills to use in creative writing. Throughout this 4 week course, we’ll read stories, brainstorm ideas, develop an outline, write a draft, and finalize a final story.
When: Thursdays, June 26 - July 17, 2025 (four sessions) | 6:00 - 7:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $95
Queer Poetics of Disability with Ashna Ali
This PSNY’s Summer Virtual Intensive is a six-week journey into the radical, unruly, pleasure-filled terrain where disability justice, queer theory, and poetry converge.
Together, we’ll explore how queer and disabled writers have long resisted the normative, ableist world by cripping time, language, and lineage itself. Through weekly readings, prompts, and community-centered discussions, we’ll write toward survival, pleasure, protest, and collective futurity.
Readings will range from poetry to critical theory, featuring writers like Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, J. Halberstam, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, and Cyree Jarelle Johnson. You’ll be invited to read as your capacity allows, with core concepts and summaries always provided for accessibility. All levels of experience with disability, poetry, or theory are welcome.
This is a space for slowness, interdependence, and imagination—a space to rewild how we think about bodies, care, kinship, and creative power.
When: Wednesdays, June 18 - July 23, 2025 (six sessions) | 6:30 - 8:30pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $150 Early Bird pricing ends June 2
A Little Class on Form with Jaz Sufi
In the spirit of Robert Hass's A Little Book on Form, this is a class about the formal imagination in poetry. Over the course of this five-week, online workshop, we'll explore a variety of different poetic forms and discuss strategies in approaching them, i.e. when to use which form for what effect. Imagine this course as a sampler plate: rather than focusing on any one form, we'll range from abecedarians to villanelles to golden shovels to ghazals, broadening our own range as writers and readers. Each week we'll respond to generative writing prompts, workshop each other's poems and discuss work by writers such as Patricia Smith, Natalie Diaz, Tracy K. Smith, Taylor Byas, Terrance Hayes and more.
When: Thursdays, June 12 - July 10, 2025 (five sessions) | 6:30 - 9:30pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $395; Save $15 with code EARLYBIRD through June 8
Fiber Arts as Book Arts: Embroidery with Iviva Olenick
Participants in this workshop will learn how to create an embroidery sampler and how to use different stitches to create text, line, and volume on paper and fabric. The class will include a demonstration and participatory activity in learning running stitch, back stitch, split stitch, French knots, and more. Students will learn how to pierce holes in paper for embroidery, learn about textile based materials that can be used for bookmaking, and practice using lightweight interfacing under paper to help stabilize it.
Students will receive video resources and instructions for creating sampler stitches, and view the work of artists who use embroidery. This is part 2 in a series of four workshops focusing on textiles and book arts. This will prepare you to participate in part 4, where you’ll learn how to create simple book forms with the fabric and paper used in this class. You might also be interested in part 3, where you’ll learn how to make ink and stamps for printmaking with food waste found at home.
When: Thursday, June 26, 2025 (5 sessions) | 6:00am - 8:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: Pay What You Can
Artists Books: Examples and Methods with Ben Denzer
In the first session, Denzer will introduce a working definition of the term “artists’ book,” share a survey of historical examples, and outline basic bookmaking techniques.
Between sessions, students will be prompted to create their own experimental artists’ books using materials they have readily available around them. Ben will be available for one-on-one chats over zoom to go over ideas, plans, in-progress work, etc.
In the second session, each student will share their completed artist book in a group critique.
When: Tuesdays, July 8 & July 15, 2025 (two sessions) | 12:00 - 2:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: Pay What You Can
The Fab Five in 6 Weeks: Writing with the Senses with Kimberly Lee
Powerful writing stimulates the senses, allowing us to fully immerse ourselves in the scene the writer has created. Infusing our pages with imagery evoking scent, touch, taste, hearing, and sight leads to a multi-dimensional experience that stays with the reader.
In this six-week workshop, we’ll use creative prompts to spend time with each of our senses, using them as inspiration for juicy, textured writing. In addition to the five senses we know best, we’ll learn about and engage in writing inspired by lesser known senses that are just as fabulous, such as proprioception and interoception.
We’ll also write with intuition, often referred to as the “sixth sense,” through an expressive arts practice of making small collages, using either digital images or magazines. A background in art is not necessary. After being directed through the process of creating a collaged card, participants will develop a piece of writing inspired by their creation. Gretchen Rubin said, “We each live in the brew of our own sensations.” Let’s make use of that brew to generate rich, delicious writing!
When: Tuesdays, June 17 - July 22, 2025 (six sessions) | 10:00am - 12:00pm CT
Where: Online
Payment: $222
Finding Your Essay’s Compass with Kelly Sundberg
Lyric essays can seem impenetrable at first, but when done well, they have a beating heart inside of them. For aspiring writers, gaining a better understanding of what makes writing lyric (or language based) can make all prose writing stronger.
This advanced creative nonfiction workshop is designed for writers of essays who are seeking to move their individual pieces to that next level. The class will be comprised of a mixture of lecture, discussion, and writing prompts.
We'll first look at examples of published essays with innovative structures and poetic language. Through analysis of the published essays, participants can expect to take away a better understanding of essay structures—how form is used to both serve and uplift content—as well as a heightened attention to language at the sentence level.
We will take the tools we've learned and apply them to workshop participant's essays in order to excavate each essay's own beating heart. A workshop is only as good as its participants, and workshopping nonfiction is an inherently vulnerable act, so students should come to class fully prepared and ready to participate in a supportive, inclusive, anti-racist, and anti-ableist manner.
Though the goals of the class are serious, this will be a dynamic, energetic, and fun virtual community. For the purposes of completing a manuscript for this class, in our allotted time together, students should aim to write a minimum of 1,000 words per week. If you cannot commit yourself to the full eight-week plan, please reconsider whether this is the right class for you, and explore other Loft class options.
When: Wednesdays, June 18 - August 6, 2025 (eight sessions; no class on July 16) | 6:00 - 8:00pm CT
Where: Online
Payment: $296
Painting Seashells with Sophie Tivona
Do you love beach combing and collecting shells? Let's celebrate these natural treasures by painting them in watercolor! This class will be a careful, slow observation of small shells, either your own or you may choose some from the source image Sophie will provide. Bring the beach vibes into your studio just in time for the heat of summer!
When: Wednesdays, June 18, 2025 | 5:00 - 6:30pm PT
Where: Online
Payment: $40
Summer Writers’ Circle with Yasmine Ameli
This is a drop-in gentle-accountability group for creative writers who are struggling to write in isolation, whether that is due to writer’s block or a busy schedule. Each week, we will begin by considering an optional writing prompt and sharing our individual intentions before embarking on a 60-minute writing session. There will be an opportunity toward the end of the session to build community in small groups during which writers are encouraged to share excerpts from their work, exchange book recommendations, and ask for/offer (solicited) writing advice.
This group is suitable for creative writers at any experience level and working in any creative genre, including multimedia creatives whose art practice includes writing. Please note that this group does not include workshop feedback and is instead generative by nature. Writers need not attend every session in order to participate.
When: Wednesdays, June 4 - August 20, 2025 (12 sessions) | 7:00 - 8:30pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: Sliding Scale, $360/$270/$180
Traveling Light: Writing the Uncertain with Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams
To be skilled writers, we must be skilled noticers. Taking that concept as genesis, our workshop will begin with what the eye can hold: landscape, season, weather, gesture—the observable light. Then, we’ll look harder, study what isn’t so easy to perceive: inheritance and loss, grief and resilience. Janet Frame says we are exiles, but she also gestures toward home. The trick is in the paradox. Using memory, language, and research, we will write to hold that tension, to write between the lines of the known and unknown world. To decenter ourselves, if need be.
This nonfiction workshop is part of that lifelong journey—one we’ll travel together for a time, though I suspect it won’t end with the last class, setting down what the world contains, so we might better understand—or even transcend—it. Students will meet over eight consecutive Sundays and draw inspiration from writers of all genres—like Ocean Vuong, Emma Bolden, Erica Berry, Felicia Zamora, J. Drew Lanham, Barry Lopez, and others. Each week, we’ll read and generate and listen. Participants will have the opportunity to workshop one essay, which the group will comment upon and discuss, along with a thirty-minute one-on-one consultation with the instructor. Together, we might get a little closer to the lost land, maybe we realize we’re already there.
When: Sundays, July 6 - August 24, 2025 (eight sessions) | 3:00 - 5:30pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $600; Application deadline is June 5, 2025
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yomalis
So grateful for your inclusion of my workshop, and so grateful to see more love for ISL in the world!!! <3 <3 <3