we the soil: May 2026
A new Study Circle! + Workshops in May 2026: Writing for Stress Management, Generative Limits, Walking as Practice, & more.
Dear makers,
Submissions are still open! We would love to see more non-fiction & photography submissions. If you have an essay-in-progress that you need might need some motivation or support (or a deadline, lol) to finish, go ahead and submit it!
My co-editor ori and I are also hosting our second Study Circle of the year! This one will be book-based, and we’ll be reading Inciting Joy by Ross Gay together. We’ll gather on Zoom on Saturdays at 11am PT / 2pm ET from June 6 - July 18 (July 4 off). There are two ways to join:
through this form (where you can find more information about this circle). Please plan to make a donation of any amount (suggested, $5-50) that will go toward paying the editors & contributors of our lit mag.
by signing up for our monthly membership starting at $4/mo. We’ll be building out all of the benefits of a membership by the end of the summer and would love to reach our goal of expanding our community with ten members by August.
Lastly, if you ever find a workshop through us that you loved, please feel free to send us a note and tell us about it so that we can celebrate and maybe even feature you in our newsletter, if you’re open to it!
Enjoy this week’s list!
upcoming workshops
below, you will find a list of workshops taking place in May 2026.
you can always submit a workshop (yours or someone else’s) for next month’s newsletter using this Workshop Submission Form.
Writing Workshops for Stress Management with Lauren Oertel
Join us to create new pieces of writing, connect with other writers, and receive encouraging support for your writing.
In a time when every day brings countless sources of stress, this workshop will provide a break from it all, including writing prompts and sharing to be present, process, and dig into the joys of creative expression and community connection. This space will provide a way to connect with others, write through the emotions, and relieve some of the stress you might be holding.
This is a generative writing workshop using the Amherst Writers & Artists (AWA) method, where you’ll write new pieces based on prompts (or whatever you feel like writing), followed by reading and responses that only identify what’s working or what resonates with readers in your writing (no critique!).
This workshop is for all levels of writers, including beginners who might not yet identify as writers. It’s also open to all genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, etc.).
When: Third Wednesdays at 12pm CT; Last Sundays at 4pm CT
Where: On Zoom
Payment: FREE
Poetry as Speculative Fiction with Shraddha Shah
To live with authenticity in these times is to live with and within the questions of how to unmake and remake (our) selves as we witness unspeakable catastrophes simultaneously.
Reassembling selves as a precondition to possibility.
Poetry is prayer. Poetry is also a speculative fictional device offering a sketchpad for world-building and hypothesis-testing. A portal into our questions, concerns, possibilities, pathways into how we must resurrect the soul: the soul of our individual selves, the soul of the interstitial spaces between us, the soul of this shared earth being carved out alive.
Together, we will learn to think through poems to explore the boundaries and geographies of the personal to political to personal. We will learn to appreciate poetry as a cartographic device to reveal present realities. And more urgently, as a simulation device with teeth and sharp edges to inquire, interrogate, indict these same realities towards constructing elsewheres for us all to inhabit, in equality and in vitality. This will be a collective study and a genre-agnostic generative writing space. Participants will be free to generate writing in any genre format and let the words on the page hold material essence and capacity to translate into the praxis of quotidian livings.
We will read works by poets and writers such as June Jordan, Craig Santos Perez, Christina Sharpe, Danez Smith, Amal Dunqal within a poetry as speculative fiction | world-building framework and write and share our own words via generative prompts and embedded time for sharing.
When: Saturday, May 16, 2026 | 11:00am US Eastern / 8:30pm India / 5pm Central European
Where: Online
Payment: Sliding Scale, $8 - $25 (USD)
Critical Wonder: Process and Poetics with Kimberly Alidio
When we regard the craft of writing as fluid and experiential, the texts we make start to function as traces of the everyday that can teach us how to write further. In the spirit of “critical wonder,” we will discuss craft issues, such as the line break and visual-sonic forms, as matters of practice, philosophy and politics threaded through our own lives as people in the world. Our guides may include Raven Chacon, Jenny Boully, Fred Moten, Fargo Nissim Tbahki, Renee Gladman, Jackie Wang, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Participants will be asked to bring any object related to their creativity, such as a song they admire or a short excerpt of a work-in-progress, and this object will serve as a prompt for a short writing exercise. The focus of this craft class will be generative writing, rather than critique. Anyone who cares about making things, including a life with language, is invited to join. Poets, prose writers, and interdisciplinary writers of color are welcome.
When: Saturday, May 9, 2026 | 1:00 - 3:30pm ET
Where: On Zoom
Payment: $50
Generative Limits: Writing as Process, Not Product with Anneysa Gaille
How can a limit be generative? While limits are often viewed as boundaries that impede growth, the Oxford English Dictionary defines limit as a bound “beyond which something ceases to be possible.” Within these bounds, however, exists limitless potential.
To probe this potential, we’ll utilize a series of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) constraints and follow the work of Harryette Mullen who said, “The most liberating aspect of Oulipo for me was their demystification of ‘inspiration’ in favor of ‘potential literature.’ This puts less stress on writing as a product and more emphasis on writing as a process that might result in a work of literature.” The workshop will then culminate in creating and naming our own sets of constraints.
When: Saturday, May 16, 2026 | 3:00 - 6:30pm ET
Where: On Zoom
Payment: $75. For sliding scale options, email office@uglyducklingpresse.org.
The Multiverse of Self: The Grey Area with Talicha J.
The Multiverse of Self: The Grey Area is a space to face the versions of ourselves we don’t always want to claim—the ones who’ve been the villain, or at least walked that line. Maybe we’ve hurt someone out of jealousy, acted out of spite, or made choices that left a mark. We are never all good or bad, and in this workshop we’ll write from that complicated truth, giving space to the selves we often try to silence.
When: Tuesday, May 12, 2026 | 5:30 - 7:30pm PT
Where: On Zoom
Payment: Sliding scale, $9 - $38
Walking as Practice with Alex Wolfe
In this six-week generative writing workshop, we’ll explore walking as a way of making new work. Through discussion, short readings, and generative prompts, we’ll consider how movement shapes attention and how those observations can be developed into writing on and off the page.
This workshop emphasizes generative writing rather than formal critique. Participants will be encouraged to walk between sessions to gather source material and return with notes, observations, and drafts to build from.
Each session includes:
• A brief introduction and group discussion
• Focused in-class writing time with prompts
• Space for sharing and reflection
Drawing on writers and artists who incorporate walking into their practice, we’ll touch on questions of memory, mapping, documentation, archiving, performance, and attention. We’ll take inspiration from short readings by writers and artists including Matsuo Bashō, Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald, Teju Cole, Esther Kinsky, Adrian Piper, Francis Alÿs, Yuji Agematsu, Werner Herzog, and Gaston Bachelard, among others.
Writing in this workshop functions both as an expressive practice in its own right and as a foundation that can translate into work across other media.
Writers and artists of all levels who are curious about the relationship between movement, observation, and writing are welcome.
When: Sundays, May 17 - June 21, 2026 (six sessions) | 1:30 - 4:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $400
Magical Intention in Poetry with Victoria Chang
Some people believe that a poem comes from some magical place, the unconscious, the muse, the ether. Other people believe that a poem comes from the writer’s intention, and others still fall somewhere in between. In this course, we’ll explore both the mysterious magical place where poetry might come from and learn about craft—the writer’s intention (sometimes through the subconscious). We’ll focus on craft and technique (the line, image, syntax, revision, and more), with an emphasis on language and the possibilities of language, so we’ll be ready for magic when it arrives. Students will be pushed beyond your comfort zones—to experiment and try new things, and will leave the course with new poems, new inspirations, and seeds for new future poems.
When: Mondays, May 4 - 25, 2026 (four sessions) | 7:00 - 8:00pm ET
Where: Online
Payment: $250
opportunities & resources
ZinesforFalastin is accepting submissions for First-Person Narrative Essays on Transnational Solidarities: South Asia & Palestine.
—
For those in Chicago! Shivani Gupta is hosting Shaam ka Nashta, a cozy gathering with 5 featured poetry readers, some chai-and-conversation, an invitation to write a postcard for a person that has nurtured you & a closing reading from the recently published collection: my mother is a mixed metaphor.
—
Plantin Magazine has open submissions for Fiction & Poetry by Black Immigrant Writers. The theme is VEXED!
Thank you so much for being a subscriber and helping support our lit mag and the work of teaching artists. Please consider forwarding this newsletter to a friend!
for more making,
yomalis