May 2021- Writing Desire into these Walls w/ Emily Marie Passos Duffy
In this workshop we will engage with intimacy as a practice. These four weeks will be an exploration of felt sense, spatial identity, and erotic experience/ language. We will explore our own erotic vocabulary through sense-based exercises, writing prompts, reading, and discussion. We will generate and investigate language that thrums. We will read and write phrases that are long, florid, and gushing. We’ll experiment with balancing rigor and play.
What does it mean to cultivate a practice of awe, wonder, reverence, and critique? And how can that bring us to liberatory aspirations and praxis? We will explore erotic experience and memory with the intention of trying on new lenses and exploring relationships to space, place, identity and labor. We’ll use different modes of making including video and photography as well as poetry, prose, and hybrid forms.
Goals:
In this workshop we will endeavor to:
- Engage with intimacy and devotion
- Experiment with balancing rigor and play
- Cultivate awe, reverence, wonder, and critique in our creative process
Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion Statement:
Emily Marie Passos Duffy (she/her)
I identify myself as a white-passing, multiethnic, able-bodied, queer, cisgender woman of Portuguese, Afro-Brazilian, and Irish descent. I am U.S.-born and a dual citizen of the U.S. and Brazil. I am a sex worker in a less criminalized area of the industry. My intersecting identities, and the varying degrees to which forms of systemic oppression benefit or impede me, inform my understanding of, and pedagogical approach to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
I began my DEI journey as a Bonner Leader, an undergraduate service-learning scholarship. My area of focus in my service was adult education, and I offered ELL classes to our college’s Spanish-speaking custodial staff. I also tutored through a program that offered GED-preparation courses to incarcerated women. Through this Bonner scholarship program, and as a Peace and Social Justice Studies minor, I began to learn about root causes of poverty, sexism, racism, immigration, mass incarceration, and how these social issues were intertwined. I participated in demonstrations and presented at two conferences. My first postgraduate job was in the Office of Service-Learning at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where I experienced working in an international context with students from a variety of cultural and class backgrounds. My journey continued at Naropa University, where I studied Writing Pedagogy with Michelle Naka Pierce, and I deepened my learning on intersectionality and identity with Sarah Richards Graba during the MFA Thesis course.
In tandem with my experiences within higher education, I have also become involved in sex worker organizing and mutual aid. I am co-founder of Tart Parlor, a reading and performance series by and for sex workers and dedicated allies. I have been trained for and volunteered with Rocky Mountain Street Outreach, which provides direct support to street-based and drug using sex workers in Denver.
My DEI goals are rooted in consent, self-determination, and collaborative learning. On this path, I am consistently humbled and reminded of how much I have yet to learn about the experiences of others. I try to remember that no identity is a monolith, and we are all to benefit from the liberation of all people and the dismantling of colonial structures and hegemonic forms of oppression.
Selected Personal and Professional Capacity Building in DEI:
- 2020 Me and White Supremacy by Layla Saad: Peer Reading and Discussion Circle
- 2019 Street Outreach volunteer training with Rocky Mountain Sex Worker Coalition & Denver Harm Reduction Action Center
- 2019 Conference on Community Writing, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
- 2016 Writing Pedagogy with Michelle Naka Pierce
Selected Offerings:
- 2020 S.Workshop: A creative writing workshop offered for erotic laborers in all parts of the industry, Colorado Entertainer Coalition
- 2014 Addressing Community Issues through Activism Theater: Ursinus’s Project on Gender Based Violence, Bonner High Impact Conference, Siena College; Bonner Congress, Guilford College
Materials: writing materials, a means to take photos/ videos, and any other creative implements you desire to utilize/ experiment with (watercolors, colored pencils, collage materials, etc.)
Bio:
Emily Marie Passos Duffy is a Colorado-based poet, teacher, and performer. Her written work has been published in Boulder Weekly, Portland Review, Cigar City Poetry Journal, Spit Poet Zine, Iron Horse Literary Review, Limit Experience Journal, and Dirt Media. She is a contributing member of The Daily Camera's Community Editorial Board and a 2020 artist-in-residence at Boulder Creative Collective. A 2020 finalist for the Noemi Press Book Award and a finalist of the 2020 Inverted Syntax Sublingua Prize for Poetry, she was also named a 2020 Disquiet International Luso-American Fellow. She is a certified Conscious Burlesque instructor and has also taught English Composition at Naropa University and Red Rocks Community College. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics from Naropa University in 2018.
Logistics:
- This workshop runs from May 1, 2021 - May 31, 2021.
- Workshops consist of one video per week for each week in the month. Videos are 45-60 minutes long, and are shared on a private YouTube account.
- Class discussions are held via Slack.
- All readings, creative prompts, and shared artwork will be exchanged via a private Google Drive folder.
- All workshops are designed for you. Dedicate as much or as little time to the workshop per week as you'd like.
- This workshop is taught in English, but collective.aporia offers subtitles for the workshop videos in over 60 languages. If you have questions about language accommodations, please feel free to email us at collective.aporia@gmail.com.
Donations:
Collective.aporia believes in paying working artists fairly for their time and work. As a diverse international collective, we also believe strongly in valuing fair exchange—whether that be monetary, energetic, or otherwise.
Because of these beliefs, our workshop donations all begin at a $40 base rate with the option to give additional donation amounts, if you’re able. Seventy percent of the donations go to facilitator, and the remainder goes back into collective.aporia for operational expenses.
Participants also have the option to donate money towards the community scholarship, which provides opportunities to folks from these communities to attend workshops at no cost.
Please check out this page to learn more and/or apply for the scholarship.
We understand that not everyone has the financial means to donate $40. In the spirit of collaboration and exchange, we have developed a work exchange initiative that allows folks to choose what kind of work they would like to trade for free entry into the workshop. Examples of this work include writing blog posts, creating and sharing social media content, editing video subtitles, etc.
Thank you for your generosity!
[Image credit: Emily Marie Passos Duffy]
