by Writing Workshops Staff
A week ago
“It’s always exciting to see how work generated in one workshop can evolve through other creative experiments and eventually find a publishing home.”
Erica Anzalone, writing to us in October 2026
At midnight, in a Las Vegas casino, a chorus of women in wet gingham dresses climbs out of a hot tub and passes around cookies on heart-shaped plates. The crowd assumes they are animatronic. They are not. That is the letter A. By D a pronatalist in business casual has gone under the water. By Y the piece has moved through fracking on the city’s edge, Liberace’s pianos, a neon moon, and a corpse in a three-piece suit, one letter at a time. There is no Z.
The piece is “Dangerous Pussy at the Manosphere Casino: An Abecedarian” by Erica Anzalone, out this month in Issue 53 of Bending Genres.
It is fiction built on a poet’s scaffolding.
Erica is a poet first. Her collection Samsara won the Noemi Press Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PhD in English from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, which means she knows the city in the story from the inside. She has taught writing at the college level for nearly two decades, runs the Substack Witch Lit, and teaches for us. Since 2022, she has also been one of our most omnivorous students.
Her record here covers flash fiction and flash nonfiction, the prose poem, the contemporary sonnet, the novella, a horror intensive, a workshop on tarot and intimacy, and a class on essay structure as recently as this September. Running through all of it is Amber Sparks. Erica has taken six of Amber’s one-day Zoom seminars, starting with The Modern Gothic in 2022 and continuing through fairy tale forms, time travel, ekphrasis, and, in April 2025, Making Literary Monsters, where this piece began.
Making Literary Monsters asks a plain question: what kind of monster does your story need? Students build a profile, play with tone and structure to balance the darkness, and leave with a draft. Erica’s monster turned out to be plural, a “we” of blue-skinned, long-tongued women who heal underwater and who once caught a dying man as he crashed through a window into their laps. A monster profile became a Greek chorus with claws.
The second move came after the seminar, when she gave the draft a spine. “The piece originated in Amber Sparks’s Making Literary Monsters workshop,” she wrote to us, “and evolved through my experimentation with the abecedarian form, which I also teach in Writing the Weird.” An abecedarian walks the alphabet, one unit per letter, and the constraint forces leaps. C is cats and blood. D is a drowning. “Going sideways is our specialty,” the narrators announce, and the form agrees with them.
Erica is also quick to note where the tools came from. “It’s also an example of how techniques associated with the lyric essay can be used in fiction,” she wrote. She took our six-week lyric essay class back in 2023 (it was called Bending the Genres, which is either a coincidence or a prophecy), and she now teaches that territory herself. The piece reads like a lyric essay that happens to be about monsters: fragments, repetition, associative leaps, a borrowed container holding something that would spill otherwise.
Bending Genres is the right home for it. The journal has published hybrid, boundary-crossing short work since 2018 and runs its own workshops and retreats, and Issue 53 puts Erica alongside Francine Witte and Jayne Martin.
She teaches three classes with us in the coming months. The Haunted Muse starts November 8 and treats ghosts as metaphors for memory, trauma, and desire, with a week on retelling myth, folklore, and true crime. Re-Enchanting the Lyric Essay starts February 14, 2027: four weeks, four forms (the list, the braided essay, the hermit crab, the segmented essay), with form treated, in her words, as a cauldron rather than a cage. Writing the Body starts March 21, 2027 and uses the five senses and defamiliarization to make the familiar strange again. All three are open to poets, fiction writers, and essayists, which is the point.
Erica's advice to other writers comes by example. Take a draft from one room into another. Let a poem’s form hold a story. Teach the thing you are still learning. And when the alphabet runs out a letter early, let it.
Her narrators end the piece in “America’s newest city,” a place where, they say, nobody should be, themselves included. The next one is wherever she takes them.
Erica’s piece started as a one-day exercise and found its shape across several classes and a couple of years. If you have a draft that needs a different container, our online workshops meet live on Zoom and run in every genre, including the ones in between.
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