Read with me! I'm teaching a class!

I’m teaching a class! Come join either the section in my living room in Northampton, MA or the section online. If you like this blog and you like to go on a journey inspired by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s Call Me Zebra, we will memorise and transcribe and write manifestos and make museums of miniatures! thresholdacademy@protonmail.com to save a seat!

Exile Punk is a class designed to help you explore and express your aesthetics and politics, by reading then inhabiting several literary forms and practices: memorization, transcription, translation, manifestos, and forming a personal literary canon. 

This course is modeled on Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s 2018 novel Call Me Zebra, a bildungsroman (coming of age story) whose protagonist does all of the above and more. The name Exile Punk gestures to the premise of Call Me Zebra: Zebra is a refugee from Iran. Exile: her life—and relationship to literature—are shaped in conversation with a larger body of refugee and exile literature. Punk: Zebra “anarchist, atheist, autodidact” is the proud inheritor of her family’s radical politics. This is a hybrid seminar and workshop, based on the premise that creative writing emerges best from an atmosphere of engaged reading.

Some words on the structure: this class is organized around the five sections of Call Me Zebra (with one additional section). Each week-long unit will focus on a particular theme which we will explore together, first through selected readings, then through writing exercises.