The Language of Love

My partner Patrick Cottrell and I will be teaching a two-hour virtual craft seminar next month for Lit Fest 2021, an annual summer writers conference organized by Lighthouse Writers Workshop. Patrick and I first taught this seminar when we visited USF together on Valentine’s Day of 2019, and I’m excited to build upon what we knew then—we’ve learned so much as writers, as lovers, as people.

Register for the workshop here. Lighthouse offers tuition assistance.

The Language of Love
bell hooks defines love as, “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is as love does.” How is love best done in writing? Much of the writing we see about love is cliché, recycling stock plots and characters, tired turns of phrase, and stereotypes that sap dimension from our experience. Our focus in this craft seminar (taught by Patrick Cottrell and Sarah Gerard) will be on languaging emotion, desire, intimacy, ecstasy, and agony, and on finding a new syntax and new stories for new forms of love. We’ll respond in our own words to works of poetry, essay, and fiction, as well as to one another.

Thu, Jun 10, 2021
8:00pm – 10:00pm EST
AVAILABILITY:15

And peek some of our other collaborations:

“Dog,” for 7×7.la
“Modern Nature,” for Burrow Press

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