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In this free, two-hour generative writing session, we’ll write using techniques inspired by the Dadaist and Surrealist writers of the early 20th century. We will borrow language, collaborate with authors both living and dead, create wild juxtapositions, and use a boatload (maybe even a drunken boatload) of chance methods, all in an effort to get out of our normal, conscious mode of thinking and enter into the dream realms of the unconscious. (You know…where the good stuff happens!) Oh yes, and we’ll have lots of fun while we do it. (“If I continue to do something,” Tristan Tzara, the granddaddy of Dada once wrote, “it is because it amuses me.”)

Don’t be intimidated by any of this jargon; what this means is, we’re going to play some games and maybe, just maybe, you’ll walk away with poems you never realized were capable of writing. You’ll meet likeminded strangers and you might even learn a thing or two. Bring a notebook, some writing utensils, and a readiness to write poems together.

“Dada is not modern at all; it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.” - Tristan Tzara, “Lecture on Dada” (1922)