Tongues: A Riot! A Mayhem! A Rampage! An Ecstasy!

Join us for an experimental writing workshop that offers the tool of using multiple tongues to approach ideas that feel so kaleidoscopic or frankensteinian that they are difficult to hold in your brain in a single voice.

In this workshop writers Fer Boyd, Rebecca Close and Madeleine Stack will read from their forthcoming books and screen an accompanying experimental film, before offering individual and collective exercises that take away the pressure of solid, subjective opinion, instead turning to conversations between bodies as a way to use contradiction, ambivalence, and confusion to create scenes, stories or poems that might be complex, funny, or high-octane in the process. 

This workshop is open to everyone and will be an inviting, generous space in which to explore voices and words no matter your level of writing experience. It is born from the belief that writing should pull you in with its personality, not push you away with opaque experimentation.

Led by writers and artists Fer Boyd, Rebecca Close and Madeleine Stack on the occasion of the launch of their poetry and fiction collections with Canal.

Fer Boyd’s bodily theories and ecstatic narratives manifest in sound, performance and text. They have been published by Extra Extra, Afterall, Liverpool Biennial and Whitechapel Gallery, and in 2018 they won the Prix International for Creative Critical Thinking awarded by the Foundation Prince Pierre de Monaco for ‘Skinned’ and ‘Detouched’ a pair of books by Alice Channer published by Eastside Projects and Motto Books.

Rebecca Close writes expansively through poetry, ceramics & creative coding. Their first collection valid, virtual, vegetable reality (2018) won the Melita Hume Prize in London. They are one half of artist duo Criticaldías, whose work has been performed and exhibited widely, including at Tate Liverpool, Serpentine Museum and MACBA, and whose videos are in Spain’s HAMACA collection. 

Madeleine Stack’s sculpture and poetry considers contemporary votive practices in queerness, revolution, religion and communications technology. Their writing has been published in Hotel, Cordite, aqnb, Another Gaze, Salt, un magazine and Doggerland, and they were a finalist in BOMB’s 2022 Poetry Contest. Their audio-essay Portable Monument was commissioned by the BBC and ICA for national radio broadcast. 

Canal is a co-operative queer press and bilingual magazine in english and spanish, that supports radical, errant and experimental work by researchers, artists and poets. In 2022 Canal will release ‘Frot the World’ a collection of fiction by Fer Boyd, and the poetry collections ‘Réplica’ by Rebecca Close and ‘Chaos Rehearsals’ by Madeleine Stack.