Surfacing (July-August 2025) a 16-session playwriting intensive over two months Monday evenings (5-7p PST / 8-10p EST) + another weekly time tbd July 7-August 25 online
What is the play you are meant to be writing now? What is submerged that might be brought to the surface? How do we tell stories outside of empire?
Wallace Stevens talks about poetry as “a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.” In her novel Housemates, Emma Eisenberg’s narrator says: "What if this is what it is all about: changing the point of view, making it so that something can be regarded, instead of imagined.”
We surface the plays we’re meant to write to bring to bear that violence from within. To make it so that a different world can be regarded, instead of imagined.
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The goal is to write the first 50 pages of a new full-length play over the course of two months. There will be exercises to surface what is lurking in the depths - at the core is a relationship to intuition, desire, and risk. We’ll also read excerpts of plays, think about shape and motion and character and pattern.
There will be one group session on Monday nights where we reflect on writing, look at a few readings, and write together in company. We’ll meet one other time a week to hear pages written for homework and talk about what’s present and surfacing there. I facilitate those conversations with a focus less on “fixing” the writing than on noticing and nourishing what’s already at play.
It’s best to start without a plan for what you’ll write. The group is structured to offer nourishment to both experienced and newer writers.
After two months, we’ll take a month off. Often at 50 pages you don’t need company walking page by page, you just need to write. If you finish a draft by October 1, I’ll read and offer feedback on the draft. The “if” being there so you have a meaningful deadline to reach an ending.
I’ll host an info session on Monday June 16 @5p PST to answer questions and share a bit more about the nature of the workshop. Let me know if you’d like to join.
Online $600 for the full workshop
I try to keep these workshops affordable. This one’s a proper two-month intensive. If it’s helpful to pay in stages, just let me know. The math comes down to about $35 / session, plus that incentive of feedback on a full draft.
For more info or to sign up, email tomorrowwillbethe22ndcentury [at] gmail [dot] com.
Words from People
Impossible Writing allowed me to go from impossible to possible. I had a gigantic writers' block for months before joining the classes with Agnes. Cut to now, and I've never felt better about my writing abilities, the words on the page and just being able to really understand writing as a fun creative form. The beautiful, generative, kind, soft, gentle way IW is structured has given me such confidence (and as someone queer, neurodiverse and who had a terrible time in the education system, this is no mean feat). Emma Sutton
Impossible Writing, in taking us away from the expected arrangements of the writing workshop, leads us subtly and deeply into realms of improvisation, experimentation, and a network of sustained support that had very surprising and reverberating outcomes for me, and my writing practice. Agnes teaches with a light touch, and seems always to know when to push a bit further, and when to let us let it go and move on. The material and assignments were among the richest I've encountered in a workshop environment. Rocket Caleshu
Regardless of what work I do with her, Agnes consistently and gently shows me how vastly bigger it could be. She has helped me center and celebrate the feminine in my work; given me permission to trust myself fully; and modeled an approach in which the teacher scrambles less (than I normally do) while the students learn more. Liesel Euler
To study with Agnes and those in her orbit is a pleasure and a privilege. Impossible Writing anchored me into myself, fed me with thoughts and readings I wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to, and introduced me to a cohort of brilliant, kind, and funny writers. My summer, my work, and my writing life would not be the same without it. Agnes’s workshop makes the impossible approachable, something you can circle around and sniff and giggle at and pass back and forth amongst you. Lauren Matthews
Impossible Writing with Agnes helped me expand my idea of what writing is and can be. It felt like getting a new pair of glasses. It felt like discovering a new food. It felt like being led by a highly qualified, kind, and precise astronaut into space, and that astronaut is Agnes. Sarah Loucks
I love, love, loved it and I can't recommend it enough. This class changed the way I think about my writing. It challenged my perceived obstacles and gave me new ways to approach my work. Stefanie Abel Horowitz
Impossible Writing is like being invited into a coven of witches that cheer you on to invent your own witch-spells, witch-planet, and witch-gender. I found the air in this group to be made of generosity and permission where you'd normally find mere oxygen. Rob Handel
Impossible Writing helped me expand my confidence as a writer, and also re-asserted that there is a non-hierarchical space of learning and collaboration. The writers drawn to Agnes's workshops are also so incredible that I was excited to just sit and learn from them as much as share work. Agnes creates an atmosphere like a magician brewing a special mix of art, poetry, silliness that allows for the individual artists to navigate the trauma and dark spaces that might be the sources of their most personal work. Even as a veteran artist/writer, these workshops opened up this space where art, spirituality, creativity, selfie-ness and selflessness could go inside together. Much like meditation or taking a long walk through the woods of an unknown city, Agnes and the community helped me face my own murky spaces with pleasure and freedom. Marianna
When I signed up, I was not aware I would be tapping into something that was deemed "impossible," because I believe the act of writing is a courageous act, even if the writing is simple. However, what I discovered is different vantage points (prompts, and readings,) in can unearth a voice that I never intended to share or didn't know I had the capability to share. For me now, the impossibility is the connection to the most joyous, playful, painful, and vulnerable aspects of my writer's voice. Laura Anne Harris
I’ve been secretly wanting to write for years now and IW gave me the soft push I needed. I entered into the workshop intimidated and nervous, and I couldn’t have imagined the kind of engagement, thoughtfulness and support I would receive. Writing used to feel esoteric to me and IW helped me to define the work for myself. Mele Sabú Borges
As "not a writer," writing helped to shift my relationship to both the idea and the reality of a writing practice, imagine how my creative practice can expand through writing, and was a soft and inspiring place to land my creative thinking for a while. Agnes is kind, open, brilliant, and wholly unusual in her approach and references. I think about the texts we read constantly. Would return in a heartbeat. Sara Lyons
"Agnes is a luminous beacon of creativity. Her teaching is exquisitely playful and profound. She imbued a sense of lightness in my process and my work that feels indispensable now. Her class expanded my vision of what is possible in my artistic life and I feel so grateful to have found it. Highly recommended!" David Largman Murray
Agnes is a creative, considerate, and sensible facilitator who can get lost in the moment while keeping everyone on track. The chosen readings and resulting discussions helped me to embrace possible new reasons for writing. While the prompts and group critiques are more like a collective deep dive into existing personal practices and universes that helped participants to expand the ideas that were already there. Agnes can inspire, challenge, and support individual writing practices because she seems to be involved in an ongoing honest love affair with writing as a mode of expression while also being deeply aware of the challenges one faces when trying to write from an authentic place. Engaging with the weekly prompts, I was able to identify some structural patterns and motivations in my writing that I am continuing to explore. The workshop helped me to embrace my fragmented writing style. Linda Franke
On workshop fees
Ok a few thoughts on this.
I like keeping these spaces accessible. I am more interested in the ongoing community and art-ecosystem building of it all than I am in making bazillions of dollars. Teaching in various forms is also central to my livelihood. So there's that.
What we pay for a workshop can sometimes shape how we show up. These workshops aren't lectures, or performances, their deepest potentialities are something a group creates together. Paying something can inform the commitment we make to participating in that electricity of shared space. So I think it's good to pay something. But paying too much can mean we lose the lightness, and the peripheral vision -- which is where the richest work happens.
(And also: our vulnerability and commitment are not programmed by money. If I didn't believe that to be true, oh gawd, all would be lost...)