Surfacing 2026
A second-annual new-play-making workshop.
There is so much that needs saying! And somehow it feels like we're all talking too much. Public space has been flooded with language. It's hard to remember what language is anymore. Real language.
It's not the well-informed and odorless puke of the LLMs. It's not marketing copy, or those styrofoam emails I get back from my senators. That much is clear. So what's the problem? From where I'm sitting, the ground has tilted so precipitously that I sometimes feel like all my own words -- and the words of the writers I love -- are tumbling into the puke puddle too.
Language isn't just information. It's not even just communication. Language is the arms -- the hands, the fingers -— of creation itself. You read Toni Morrison and her sentences aren't just beautiful. You feel the shock of contact with something living. You become more alive.
Language is alive. It is embedded in relationship. It unfolds inside duration.
When we write plays we put ourselves in the way of the spoken word and the living word. And when we write together we listen differently. We build a little roof over our heads and things get deeper, stranger, more joyful. The breeze picks up.
Surfacing is a 16-session playwriting intensive that unfolds over the course of 11 weeks.
The central question this year is: What is real language? And how do we build a practice inside of it?
Tuned to nourish both newer playwrights and experienced writers wanting some fresh air and accountability. All online, with a mix of reading, conversation, co-writing, small group feedback, and tailored prompts. The alternative to jabber isn't silence. It's companionship, labor, revision, time.
A second-annual new-play-making workshop.
There is so much that needs saying! And somehow it feels like we're all talking too much. Public space has been flooded with language. It's hard to remember what language is anymore. Real language.
It's not the well-informed and odorless puke of the LLMs. It's not marketing copy, or those styrofoam emails I get back from my senators. That much is clear. So what's the problem? From where I'm sitting, the ground has tilted so precipitously that I sometimes feel like all my own words -- and the words of the writers I love -- are tumbling into the puke puddle too.
Language isn't just information. It's not even just communication. Language is the arms -- the hands, the fingers -— of creation itself. You read Toni Morrison and her sentences aren't just beautiful. You feel the shock of contact with something living. You become more alive.
Language is alive. It is embedded in relationship. It unfolds inside duration.
When we write plays we put ourselves in the way of the spoken word and the living word. And when we write together we listen differently. We build a little roof over our heads and things get deeper, stranger, more joyful. The breeze picks up.
Surfacing is a 16-session playwriting intensive that unfolds over the course of 11 weeks.
The central question this year is: What is real language? And how do we build a practice inside of it?
Tuned to nourish both newer playwrights and experienced writers wanting some fresh air and accountability. All online, with a mix of reading, conversation, co-writing, small group feedback, and tailored prompts. The alternative to jabber isn't silence. It's companionship, labor, revision, time.
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October 5-December 7
(No meetings weeks of 11/16, 11/23) Mondays 4-6p PST / 7-9p EST (full group) + weekly bunk meetings to be scheduled (90 min) We meet as a full group on Monday evenings for two hours, read together, write in company, talk about process and form. Everyone is also matched with a "bunk" of 3-4 other writers. Bunks meet weekly for 90 minutes to read fresh pages. Six weeks in, we'll take three weeks off, and give our projects time to deepen and evolve, before we have our last two weeks of group meetings. |
$775
Sign up before 9/11 for early-bird rate of $675.
A 50% deposit is required to sign up. Refunds are available up to 1 week before the workshop beings. After that, deposits are nonrefundable. But like, if money is an issue, talk to me.
To join, email:
[email protected]
Feel free to write with any questions.
Sign up before 9/11 for early-bird rate of $675.
A 50% deposit is required to sign up. Refunds are available up to 1 week before the workshop beings. After that, deposits are nonrefundable. But like, if money is an issue, talk to me.
To join, email:
[email protected]
Feel free to write with any questions.
Words on the Surfacing Workshop from Summer 2025
This is a remarkable workshop-- Agnes brings in so much great material, provides amazing fresh prompts and cultivates an atmosphere that makes room for process, exploration, discovery, and new modes of thought and feeling. It was a truly joyous and expansive experience and one I highly recommend.
Aimee Bender
Agnes's classes are like these long-form, metaphorical landscapes that you get to wander through, always with more paths than you expected, always a million nooks and crannies you try to mark with stones to return to later. When things have started to feel a little closed down in my brain/writing, her classes have repeatedly helped me open up space and possibility.
Addie Ulrey
Agnes creates a community of writers to help each other in the struggle to create pages. The workshop, the writing prompts, the readings are unique and generative, the experience itself was so moving. It helped not only see new dimensions of performance texts, but also helped challenge negative self-talk.
Joseph Shragge
Agnes created an environment where I felt free to write without fear or judgement. She’s a phenomenal facilitator, and I grew so much as a writer working with her and my classmates. I am so proud of the play I wrote in her workshop; frankly, it is my most authentic artistic expression to date.
Adrien
A playful, provocative class that explores meaning making beyond the psychological narrative. Small, strange ideas are given love and support. I ended up with a play couldn't have been created in any other way.
Maggie C.
Surfacing (July-August 2025)
a 16-session playwriting intensive
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.
This is a remarkable workshop-- Agnes brings in so much great material, provides amazing fresh prompts and cultivates an atmosphere that makes room for process, exploration, discovery, and new modes of thought and feeling. It was a truly joyous and expansive experience and one I highly recommend.
Aimee Bender
Agnes's classes are like these long-form, metaphorical landscapes that you get to wander through, always with more paths than you expected, always a million nooks and crannies you try to mark with stones to return to later. When things have started to feel a little closed down in my brain/writing, her classes have repeatedly helped me open up space and possibility.
Addie Ulrey
Agnes creates a community of writers to help each other in the struggle to create pages. The workshop, the writing prompts, the readings are unique and generative, the experience itself was so moving. It helped not only see new dimensions of performance texts, but also helped challenge negative self-talk.
Joseph Shragge
Agnes created an environment where I felt free to write without fear or judgement. She’s a phenomenal facilitator, and I grew so much as a writer working with her and my classmates. I am so proud of the play I wrote in her workshop; frankly, it is my most authentic artistic expression to date.
Adrien
A playful, provocative class that explores meaning making beyond the psychological narrative. Small, strange ideas are given love and support. I ended up with a play couldn't have been created in any other way.
Maggie C.
Surfacing (July-August 2025)
a 16-session playwriting intensive
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.
Previously…
Writing as Apprenticeship
A circle of practice // March - June 2026
Who or what are we listening to when we write? To what frequencies are we tuning our inner radios? Writing can be an act of will, or force – it can also be an act of attendance (waiting), and an act of service. To apprentice oneself to something is to attend to it, listen to it, learn from it, open ourselves to be transformed by it. You might apprentice yourself to a god, to a place, to a person, to a practice, to a word, to a story, to an element. Together, we will embark upon specific acts of personal apprenticeship, and keep each other company as those apprenticeships unfold over four months.
We will meet twice a month for three hours. During each meeting, we will read together and share experiences. We will spend at least an hour each session writing silently in one anothers’ company. There will be both specific prompts and space to pursue existing projects. We will occasionally share our work.
The goal here is to attune ourselves differently, to reinvigorate our practices by radically reframing them. It is to write in solidarity with one another, and in solidarity with the planet where we live.
-
A little more context on where this is coming from:
Like many of us, I have been living inside of the terrible questions of what to do in this time – how best to direct one’s limited time, resources, energy. We are distressed by the unspeakable violence unfolding around us. The internet homogenizes our responses, autotunes them and sets them to caffeinated backing tracks. Recruited into a lockstep logic of expediency, we find ourselves spat out and exhausted – smudged mirror-images of the very forces we set out to dismantle.
Behind the question of the internet, behind overwhelm and exhaustion, is a question about source. Where are we sourcing our doing? On what ground are we building the house of our being? I am convinced that that source can’t be individual intellect or personal will. We may all choose to dedicate ourselves differently – I’m sure we all already are (to a practice, a tradition, a place, a body of water, a word, an element) – but there is a kind of force in doing it collectively. Voices resonate in company. Time moves differently in a temple.
There is no substitute for knowing neighbors, delivering food, standing in courthouses, sending money, making noise outside detention centers, weeding gardens, and on and on. But we aren’t going to make it if we can’t also dedicate space to slowness, attention, and imagination. Writing as Apprenticeship is meant as a space for knitting together inner and outer, practices of attention to inner and outer worlds.
A circle of practice // March - June 2026
Who or what are we listening to when we write? To what frequencies are we tuning our inner radios? Writing can be an act of will, or force – it can also be an act of attendance (waiting), and an act of service. To apprentice oneself to something is to attend to it, listen to it, learn from it, open ourselves to be transformed by it. You might apprentice yourself to a god, to a place, to a person, to a practice, to a word, to a story, to an element. Together, we will embark upon specific acts of personal apprenticeship, and keep each other company as those apprenticeships unfold over four months.
We will meet twice a month for three hours. During each meeting, we will read together and share experiences. We will spend at least an hour each session writing silently in one anothers’ company. There will be both specific prompts and space to pursue existing projects. We will occasionally share our work.
The goal here is to attune ourselves differently, to reinvigorate our practices by radically reframing them. It is to write in solidarity with one another, and in solidarity with the planet where we live.
-
A little more context on where this is coming from:
Like many of us, I have been living inside of the terrible questions of what to do in this time – how best to direct one’s limited time, resources, energy. We are distressed by the unspeakable violence unfolding around us. The internet homogenizes our responses, autotunes them and sets them to caffeinated backing tracks. Recruited into a lockstep logic of expediency, we find ourselves spat out and exhausted – smudged mirror-images of the very forces we set out to dismantle.
Behind the question of the internet, behind overwhelm and exhaustion, is a question about source. Where are we sourcing our doing? On what ground are we building the house of our being? I am convinced that that source can’t be individual intellect or personal will. We may all choose to dedicate ourselves differently – I’m sure we all already are (to a practice, a tradition, a place, a body of water, a word, an element) – but there is a kind of force in doing it collectively. Voices resonate in company. Time moves differently in a temple.
There is no substitute for knowing neighbors, delivering food, standing in courthouses, sending money, making noise outside detention centers, weeding gardens, and on and on. But we aren’t going to make it if we can’t also dedicate space to slowness, attention, and imagination. Writing as Apprenticeship is meant as a space for knitting together inner and outer, practices of attention to inner and outer worlds.
Words on Previous Impossible Writing Workshops
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
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Workshop History Summer 2022 - Impossible Writing (3 cohorts) Fall 2022 - Impossible Writing (2 cohorts) Summer 2023 - Impossible Writing (3 cohorts) Fall 2023 - Impossible Writing, Undergrounding Winter 2024 - Impossible Writing, Relational Forms I Summer 2024 - Hopscotch (2 cohorts) Fall 2024 - Impossible Writing, Hopscotch, Relational Forms II (2 sessions) Winter 2025 - Impossible Writing, Relational Forms Summer 2025 - Surfacing Spring 2026 - Writing as Apprenticeship |
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...)
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...)