Greetings and salutations! Just a quick newsletter to tell you what's happening on the stoop this week, including the long-awaited return of our free Thursday workshops! |
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- Wednesday, 10/2, 3:30-5:30pm: Creative Coworking, on Zoom. Stop by for a few minutes or stay for the whole session — it’s totally up to you. You can use this time to write, edit, read, daydream, or whatever best serves your literary life. This is a virtual and free event, donations welcome.
- Thursday, 10/3, 4:00-5:00pm: Thursdays on the Stoop — Celebrate with Me. Join Sisi Reid of Soul Shine Theater Garden for one hour of writing and movement exercises inspired by Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me”. This is a virtual and free event, donations welcome.
- Saturday, 10/5, 2:00-4:00pm ET: Novels in Progress: Johns x Ivory @ Parkway Central Library. A salon-style reading and conversation featuring the work of two writers (Alaina Johns and M.J. Ivory) deep in the process of a long project. This is an in-person and free event, donations welcome.
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We're still in the process of securing grant funding to sustain this type of programming. If you like these offerings and want to see more of them, consider pitching in a couple bucks on a recurring or one-time basis. We appreciate any support you're able to offer! |
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Did you miss last week's virtual info session about our fall classes? Watch the recording here: |
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Starts 10/10 | 6 weeks | Thursdays, 6–8 pm ET | Zoom This 6-week class will guide students through the audio story production process, from pitching and finding stories to final sound mixing. This course is open to students of all experience levels — beginners will learn the fundamentals of podcast creation, and more experienced students will hone their skills, narrative voices, and sound design chops. Students will walk away from the course having produced a short audio story or structured interview. No special equipment required. Instructors: Alex Hanesworth (they/them) is a radio maker interested in the liberatory potential of memory work, place-based storytelling, oral history, queer history and community archives. They work in museums, currently as the digital media specialist for the Undocumented Organizing Collecting Initiative. In the past, they have made audio tours for the RISD Museum, worked as a curatorial assistant for the Center for Restorative History, taught queer oral history for the Providence Public Library and given tours for the Wharton Esherick Museum. They currently live in West Philadelphia with their little dog, Luca. Clare Boyle (he/they) is telling stories about trans histories and futures, grief, harm reduction, and people generally fucking shit up towards collective liberation. Alongside their writing and editing practices, Clare works in harm reduction and is passionate about offering people within justice movements the tools to share their own stories. They live in Philadelphia and are especially proud of being from the Midwest. Starts 10/13 | 6 weeks | Sundays, 4–6 pm ET | Zoom In this hands-on, 6-week workshop, participants will experiment with various forms of memoir, including brief "flash" pieces, fragmented/episodic tellings, graphic/illustrated memoir, and pieces that use second- or third-person narration. Taking inspiration from convention-breaking writers like Dagoberto Gilb, Naomi Shihab Nye, Tim O'Brien, Ross Gay, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Rebekah Taussig and others, students will apply these writers' strategies to their own work in the spirit of risk-taking, playfulness and discovery. Designed for both beginning and more practiced memoir writers, this class will include opportunities for close reading, discussion, generative writing and peer critique. Instructor: Anndee Hochman is a journalist, essayist, storyteller and teaching artist. Her books include Anatomies: A Novella and Stories (Picador USA) and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home (The Eighth Mountain Press). For nine years, her “Parent Trip” column appeared weekly in the Philadelphia Inquirer, and her work—features, essays, reviews and short fiction—has also been published in WebMD; Poets & Writers; O, the Oprah Magazine; Broad Street Review; Purple Clover and numerous anthologies, including The The Best Short Stories of Philadelphia. Hochman is also a storyteller, an eight-time winner of Moth Story Slam competitions (she tied for first place in the December 2022 GrandSlam in Philadelphia), and a teaching artist who works with teens, children and adults. For more than 30 years, she has taught poetry, creative non-fiction, memoir and storytelling in settings that include schools, writing conferences and workshops, juvenile detention facilities, senior centers and a small fishing village on Mexico’s Pacific coast. She lives in Philadelphia. |
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All of our fall classes are eligible for financial aid. If you're based in the greater Philadelphia area and low-income, you could save up to 75% on listed tuition prices. Applying for aid is quick and easy, with instant results. |
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Need more time to pay for your class? Reach out to info@bluestoop.org to request a payment plan. |
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In solidarity, Julian Shendelman
Co-Director P.S. Looking for more local literary connections? Check out our community calendar and resource pages. |
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​​The Philly Queer Book Club is a monthly queer book club in Philadelphia celebrating those who love reading and discussing queer literature. We are hosted at PAT @ Giovanni’s Room, the longest running queer book store in the country. We typically meet every first Thursday at 6 p.m. for discussions and plans for future meetings. You can come every month, just once, or simply follow along at home– we just want people reading queer books, establishing a community, and supporting queer business! Check out our insta ( @phillyqueerbookclub) and our website phillyqueerbookclub.com for more information. |
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Got an event, organization, business, or book to promote? |
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BEYOND THE STOOP Here's a quick excerpt from our community calendar. If you've got an upcoming literary event, add it to the page. It's free! |
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~~~~~~~~~ Event title THE WRITING ROOM @ MAKING WORLDS Start time 10/4/2024 1:00pm Location Making Worlds Bookstore & Social Center - 210 South 45th Street Philadelphia, PA, 19104 Description Come co-work with other writers in three 40-minute units of silent writing, every other Friday starting September 20th, from 1–4pm. Writers and projects of any type are welcome. Includes 10-minute breaks between units, with optional task-oriented self-accountability check-ins. Feel no pressure to share the content of what you are working on during the sessions. The Writing Room provides a friendly, low-stress way to carve out focus through the silent company of others while learning to break larger (and sometimes daunting) projects into less stressful (and possibly pleasurable!) units of concentrated attention. BYO computer chargers, notepads, etc. Come and go as you please. This method has been designed with the practices of writing pedagogy, mindfulness, trauma-informed nervous system regulation, and anarchist pedagogy in mind. Facilitated by Shannan (she/they) Link Contact info info@makingworldsbooks.org Cost $0-25 suggested donation ~~~~~~~~~ Event title AAI Open House Start time 10/4/2024 4:00pm Location Asian Arts Initiative 1219 Vine Street Philadelphia PA 19107 Description Welcome to AAI's Open House! Dive into three floors of interactive displays showcasing our brand-new Education and Invasive Species Catalogs. Shop for unique art pieces and support He(ART)s Out for Palestine’s amazing fundraising efforts. Unleash your creativity with Block Printing workshops by Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI), rock out with our live band, and belt out your favorite tunes during karaoke in the theater! Mingle with fellow art enthusiasts, savor delicious food and drinks, and enjoy all the festivities as we celebrate our fabulous space and community partnerships. Plus, don’t forget to check out the grand opening of the AAI Retail + Gift Shop! Link Contact info Asian Arts Initiative 1219 Vine Street Philadelphia, PA 19107 215-557-0455 https://asianartsinitiative.org /Instagram / Facebook Press Contacts: Jino Lee, Brand & Publicity Director jino@asianartsinitiative.org Cost $20 ~~~~~~~~~ Event title Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers Start time 10/8/2024 6:00pm Location Kelly Writers House, 3805 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Description This performance and discussion coincides with a Brodsky Gallery installation of work from Upstage (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024), a book in which words by Bruce Andrews and visuals by Sally Silvers combine to explore distinctive looks, textures, and language of pandemic-era Asbury Park, NJ. Link Contact info wh@writing.upenn.edu Cost Free ~~~~~~~~~ Event title Megan Quigley, "Eliot Now" Start time 10/9/2024 6:00pm Location Main Point Books, 116 N. Wayne Ave, Wayne, PA 19087 Description Main Point Books welcomes Megan Quigley to celebrate the launch of her new anthology "Eliot Now." This event will be in our lower level event space. RSVPs are requested via Eventbrite. About the Book Eliot Now collects new and established voices in Eliot studies, integrating contemporary critical approaches with careful attention to the newly published materials. Whether grappling with the controversial new two-volume Poems, narrating the experience of opening Eliot's letters in the Emily Hale papers (until 2020 the “most famous sealed archive in the world”), or rereading his works through ecocritical or trans studies lenses, Eliot Now shows how this most effusively celebrated and heatedly criticized 20th-century writer continues to change the way we read literature in the 21st century. Link Contact info Elliott batTzedek Cost Free ~~~~~~~~~ |
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1315 Walnut Street, Suite 300
Philadelphia, PA 19107, United States |
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