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Alumni Spotlight: Teri Carson Publishes “Sunshine” in ANMLY
by Writing Workshops Staff
2 weeks ago
“Sit down and tap tap tap.”
That is Teri Carson’s whole method for the days the writing refuses to come. Teri is a Mexican visual artist, writer, filmmaker, and educator living in Chicago. Her films have screened internationally, and her screenplays have won multiple awards. Her studio work runs from crocheted site-specific pieces and a mural on the 53rd Street viaduct in Hyde Park to scrolls printed from scans she made at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, and she is a 2026/2027 Arts Club of Chicago Fellow. You can see the range at teresitacarsonvaldez.com. Writing was the one medium she described, before this fall, as “okay.”
In September she joined Erica Anzalone’s Writing the Weird: 4 Weeks, 4 Uncanny Creations, a generative Zoom class built on a single technique: defamiliarization, the practice of making the familiar strange enough that a reader has to look at it again. The four weeks are organized by creature (angels, ghosts, beasts, monsters), the reading list runs from George Saunders and Russell Edson to Matt Bell, and Mary Karr’s “Sacred Carnality” sits underneath all of it as a touchstone for trading abstraction for the five senses. Every session ends in a prompt. Erica, a poet with an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of Samsara, teaches the technique for the plainest reason available: it is fun, and a reader who meets a man turned into vermin in the first sentence wants to know what happens in the second. Asked what from the class still shapes her writing, Teri answered, “Learning how to use defamiliarization.” Asked what she enjoyed most: “Reading assignments, prompts and craft discussions.” Her writing life, she says, went from “okay” to “re-energized.”
The result she reports is modest in her phrasing (“I wrote a handful of micro fiction”) and not at all modest on the page. One of those micros, “Sunshine,” appears in the Flash & Micros folio of ANMLY #43. It runs a few hundred words and takes place in a hospital: a slow procession down a corridor, a machine keeping time in beeps, a doctor’s coat with a logo stitched on it, a hallway so long the narrator cannot find its vanishing point.
ANMLY, formerly Anomaly, is an international journal of literature and the arts that looks for work challenging convention in form, voice, and genre, and that actively seeks out writers from marginalized communities. Its editors describe the journal as a cabinet of small magazines, each folio run by its own editor and readers. A micro has nowhere to hide and no room to explain itself. ANMLY took hers.
Her advice for anyone circling a class and not committing: “It’s cheaper than grad school. Invest in yourself.” And when the investment stops paying for a day or a week, you already know the method. Sit down. Tap tap tap.
Teri is back in Erica’s classroom on November 8 for The Haunted Muse: Memory, Trauma, Desire, and the Art of Ghosts, four weeks on the ghost as witness, antagonist, and muse. Anyone who has read “Sunshine” will understand why that is the right room. Until then, you can find her on Substack, where the bio reads, in full, “Visual artist, filmmaker, writer, educator.” Four words. She is not wasting any.
Teri took one four-week class and came out with a handful of micros and a place in ANMLY. If you have a piece that is “okay” and you suspect it could be more than that, a small generative class with a working writer is a reasonable next step. See what is enrolling now.
