From the “fitful phosphorescence” and “corrugated flesh” of Clive Barker’s Cenobites in The Hellbound Heart to the whispered echo of “do you want it?” in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Black Flame, erotic horror has long captivated our senses and commanded our attention.

This workshop invokes erotic horror as both a genre and a lens through which we can approach writing fiction, creative nonfiction, and critical essays in turn. Where a more straightforward class might begin and end with clear definitions and trope analysis, we will not stop there but proceed through a more open-ended inquiry, never assuming that we already know what horror, the erotic, and their permutations have to teach us.

Visceral will take you on a journey, not from the place of not-knowing to confident expert, but into a deeper engagement with unsettledness that foregrounds curiosity and desire. We will touch upon the sublime, aesthetics, and the thin line between disgust and arousal, following the throughlines of obsession into the muck of the sensory detail that will animate our writing practice.

Designed both for writers and for those who don’t (yet) consider themselves members of that category, this workshop is for anyone who wants to engage with writing as a living practice and process of experimentation, beyond the strictures of perfectionism.