Sundress Academy for the Arts Presents “Writing Animals”

The Sundress Academy for the Arts is excited to present “Writing Animals,” a workshop led by Juliana Roth on August 10, 2022, from 6:00-7:30 PM. This event will be held over Zoom. Participants can access the event at tiny.utk.edu/sundress (password: safta).

From Eileen Myles and Paul Lisicky to Ross Gay and Gary Snyder, we will explore writers documenting animals with nuance, reverence, and respect. Using these examples, we’ll turn our attention to the animals in our own lives through guided prompts and a short meditation that asks you to inhabit the body of a nonhuman animal.

You will craft poems, stories, or essays on your chosen animal subject after these exercises, whether that be your pets or that cute frog you saw that one time on a park bench. Perhaps your relationships with animals are conflicted: you actually don’t like them, maybe even fear them or contend with cultural complexities over domination and control of animal bodies. Every shade of awe, alarm, and shadow projection on what we see as nonhuman—or animal—is welcome. During our time, we come closer to understanding the mythology of the animals in our lives.

While there is no fee to participate in this workshop, those who are able and appreciative may make donations directly to Juliana Roth via Venmo at @juliana-roth, via PayPal at https://paypal.me/julianaroth, or through Anchor at https://anchor.fm/drawinganimals/support.

Juliana Roth is a writer, filmmaker, educator, and performer. She’s worked for the World Animal Awareness Society, the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition, Vegan Outreach, and the Ecology Center and formerly lived as a volunteer on an organic farm in Maine and out of a backpack in the wilderness of Utah’s La Sal Mountains. She now teaches writing at NYU. You can receive her weekly essay, podcast, and doodle inspired by our interconnection with animal lives, Drawing Animals, by subscribing here.