This four-week class will serve as a crash course on this subgenre of horror writing, with a keen focus on the intersection of abjection and the female/femme body as used to express historically marginalized experiences based also on race, disability, age, sexual orientation, etc. as well as gender. While we'll reference body horror in film and dig up the roots of the genre found in mythology and fairy tales to add dimension to this brief survey, the focus will be on the page, and we'll study literary examples to then experiment with writing our own stories. This class is for prose writers with an emphasis on fiction, but we'll explore body horror from the position of CNF-inspired exercises to write extended metaphors to express our bodies, ourselves. There will be necessary reading assigned each week outside of class (craft essays and short stories); writers will also be given optional writing prompts each week to do on their own, with time allotted in class to share.
Content warning: This class is for writers who don’t have any problems reading, writing, or viewing blood, guts, gore, and other social taboos (keep in mind, the grotesque in body horror is rarely the result of violence, but has more to do with transformation/invasion/mutation/contagion). We'll also be looking at difficult subject matter such as racism, sexism, self-harm, disordered eating, and sexual violence.
