Writing the Body Workshop: The Five Senses | Mar 2027 Online

Writing the Body Writing Workshop: The Five Senses and the Art of Defamiliarization with Dr. Erica Anzalone

Begins Sunday, March 21, 2027
Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Sundays, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET

🌍 Class Times by Time Zone:

• Los Angeles (PDT): 9:00 AM – 11:00 AM
• Chicago (CDT): 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM
• New York (EDT): 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM
• London: 4:00 PM – 6:00 PM (GMT) on March 21; 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM (BST) from March 28
• Berlin: 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM (CET) on March 21; 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (CEST) from March 28

Now Enrolling!

Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button to talk with us.

Instructor Dr. Erica Anzalone is the author of the award-winning collection, Samsara. Erica holds an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a doctorate in English from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, where she was awarded a Schaeffer fellowship. With over eighteen years of teaching experience at the college level, Erica's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Autofocus Literary Magazine, The Colorado Review, Hotel Amerika, Cream City Review, Juked, Pangyrus, Denver Quarterly, The Literary Review, The Offending Adam, Pleiades, Sentence, UCity Review, and elsewhere.

Who is this class for?

This online writing workshop is for poets, fiction writers, lyric essayists, and hybrid writers of all levels who want to bring greater sensory vividness and embodied lyricism to their work. You’ll learn to use the five senses and defamiliarization to transform abstraction and cliché into strange, visceral language while generating four new drafts or developing works-in-progress.

What to expect:

How do we make the body come alive on the page? In this generative multigenre writing workshop, we’ll explore poetry, the lyric essay, and fiction through the five senses, using Mary Karr’s “Sacred Carnality” and Matthew Zapruder’s “Make It Strange” as guides. Each week focuses on one or more senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch) as portals into the body’s strangeness, beauty, and complexity. Through the technique of defamiliarization, you’ll learn to turn the familiar into the uncanny, the grotesque, and the sublime. Along the way, we’ll engage the body in extremis: pain, illness, addiction, pleasure, and transcendence.

Dr. Anzalone brings a poet’s attention to language and image together with an intellectually rigorous but accessible approach to craft. Rather than teaching sensory writing as a set of isolated techniques, this creative writing course brings ideas such as Karr’s “Sacred Carnality” and defamiliarization into conversation with one another. It then uses close reading across poetry, fiction, and nonfiction to show how those ideas actually work on the page.

Each live session of this Zoom writing class combines discussion of the readings with in-class writing prompts, so you’ll leave every week with new material. You’ll have the opportunity to share new writing with the group each week and receive supportive writing feedback. You may also submit work twice during the course for individualized written feedback from Dr. Anzalone. Whether you’re starting fresh or developing works-in-progress, this online writing class offers a welcoming space to deepen the sensory life of your writing.

What are the writing goals?

In this course, students will generate four new drafts or develop works-in-progress through in-class writing prompts. Students may submit work twice during the course for individualized written feedback from Dr. Anzalone. Each submission may include one poem of up to 2 pages or one prose piece of up to 2,000 words. Students will also have the opportunity to share new writing generated in class each week and receive supportive feedback from the group.

Readings

Readings may include excerpts from work by Mary Karr, Sylvia Plath, Charles Simic, Victoria Chang, Matthew Zapruder, Sarah Rose Etter, Lia Purpura, Jeremy B. Jones, Patricia Smith, Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, Jane Wong, Lester Bangs, Denis Johnson, and Hailey Leithauser. Weekly selections are listed in the course outline below.

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: Still Life with Sacred Carnality: Bringing Objects Alive

Students will use concrete sensory detail and close observation to transform abstraction into vivid physical language and bring ordinary objects to life on the page.

• Mary Karr, “Sacred Carnality”
• Sylvia Plath, “Mirror”
• Charles Simic, “Fork”
• Victoria Chang, “Obit”

Week 2: Make It Strange (and Visceral): The Body in Extremis

Students will use defamiliarization to make the body strange and newly perceptible, generating unexpected imagery and language from embodied experience.

• Matthew Zapruder, “Make It Strange”
• Sarah Rose Etter, “The Spine”
• Lia Purpura, “Autopsy Report”

Week 3: Hungry Ghosts: Writing Smell, Taste, and Memory

Students will use smell and taste as portals into memory, appetite, grief, and cultural or personal history, following sensory associations into new writing.

• Jeremy B. Jones, “The Nose Knows: How Smells Can Connect Us to the Past and Lead Us to the Page”
• Patricia Smith, “My Bricks Be Foul”
• Christine Hyung-Oak Lee, “Mint”
• Jane Wong, “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly”

Week 4: Altered Perceptions: The Body’s Music in Rapture and Ruin

Students will experiment with syntax, sound, imagery, and sensory distortion to evoke altered states of consciousness and perception on the page.

• Lester Bangs, “I Saw God / Or Tangerine Dream”
• Denis Johnson, “Car Crash While Hitchhiking”
• Hailey Leithauser, “Arrhythmia”

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• Use defamiliarization to combat cliché and create striking language that holds readers spellbound
• Use the five senses to alchemize abstraction and create an embodied experience
• Receive detailed feedback from Dr. Anzalone and your peers
• Generate four new drafts or refine works-in-progress through in-class writing prompts

TESTIMONIALS:

“Thank you, Erica, for a fabulous class! I've learned so much about the writing process and relished the texts. Each class has helped awaken long-slumbering skills of analysis and muscles of creativity that I haven't exercised in some time. I'm especially grateful for the workshop portion, both for my own piece and for others. I've always been insecure about my writing style, but these classes have really boosted my confidence and filled my well of creativity. The workshop notes I received validated my process and helped magnify the paths to take next. I'm so grateful to Erica and the writing coven that is forming through these classes.”

— Kristilyn Ink

“With Erica’s mentorship, I am now attending the MFA program of my choice and have published several of my poems. She saw potential where I did not, and she pushed me out of my comfort zone by encouraging me to write creative non-fiction. She taught me to trust in my own writing and the fact that my stories are valuable on their own. I fell in love with creative non-fiction because of her. Not only did Erica spend an ample amount of time with me (more than she had to!), she provided me with pages of written feedback that helped me revise and assist in the publication process. I am a much stronger, more confident writer since working with Erica, and am successfully pursuing a career in the field of creative writing.”

— Kerri Vasilakos (Kerri’s poetry has appeared in Black Moon Magazine, The Ekphrastic Review, The Penman Review, and Crow and Cross Keys)

“Erica helped me with my applications to MFA programs in Creative Writing. With her assistance, I was accepted or waitlisted to every place I applied, and I'm now a student in my top-choice program. Throughout our work together, Erica was empathetic, challenging, and generous. She helped me to present myself with confidence and clarity. Her feedback was always specific and extensive, and I know the advice she gave me was critical to the success of my applications. I'm sure these skills transfer over to her classes together. I can't recommend working with Erica enough!”

— Lizzie Fox, Writer/Translator

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $330 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

• Instructor: Dr. Erica Anzalone
• Begins Sunday, March 21, 2027
• Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Sundays, 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM ET
• Tuition is $330 USD.