Writing the Body: A Lyrical Exploration of the Senses

How do we make the body come alive on the page? In this generative creative writing class, we’ll explore the lyric essay and poetry through the five senses, using Mary Karr’s Sacred Carnality and Matthew Zapruder’s Make It Strange as guides. Writers will transform abstraction and cliché into vivid, embodied language through the technique of defamiliarization.

Each week, we’ll focus on one or more senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch—as portals into the body’s strangeness, beauty, and complexity. Through reading, discussion, and in-class prompts, we’ll explore how defamiliarization can turn the familiar into the uncanny, the grotesque, and the sublime. Along the way, we’ll engage the body in extremis—pain, illness, addiction, pleasure, and transcendence.

For poets, lyric essayists, hybrid writers, or anyone interested in bringing an embodied lyricism to their work. All levels welcome.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Use defamiliarization to combat cliche and create striking language that holds readers spellbound
• Use the five senses to alchemize abstraction and create an embodied experience
• The opportunity to receive detailed feedback from Dr. Anzalone and your peers
• Generate four new drafts or refine works-in-progress through in-class writing prompts

SCHEDULE: 4 Sundays from 12 PM - 2 PM EST, January 18th - February 8th

Location: Live on Zoom and in-person at The Foundry. You can choose which option suits you best. Once you sign up, I will send you a Zoom link.

The Foundry (101 Rogers Street, Cambridge, MA 02142), Shop 3 | White Multi Room)

Curious about the kind of writing we’ll be engaging with?
Weekly readings are available for free on my website. Each week’s selections are carefully curated to be approachable and energizing, spark discussion, and inspire new work.

Dr. Erica Anzalone’s Bio

Erica Anzalone is the Executive Director of Witch Lit. She is a writer and educator with over twenty years of experience teaching creative writing at the college level and beyond. She is the author of Samsara, winner of the Noemi Press Poetry Prize, which explores art, war, feminism, religion, and the body through a spiritual-historical lens.

She holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctorate in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she received a Schaeffer Fellowship. Her work has appeared in Pleiades, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere.

Erica’s classes are welcoming, thoughtful, and generative, designed to support writers at all stages. She is especially committed to helping students develop their voices through close reading, experimentation, and sustained engagement with their own curiosity.

Questions? Feel free to email me at [email protected].

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