Muse & the Marketplace 2019

Just as our culture suggests that we not talk about certain things, we're also often taught not to write about certain things. For example: It's inappropriate to mention someone's race to their face. It's bad form to speak about our sex lives among strangers or even friends. Most taboos stem from the desire, at some level above us, to protect power. Words and thoughts are related. 

In this session, we'll discuss how to move in the opposite direction-- to boldly examine, in our writing, stigmatized ideas, settings, characters, and problems. We'll discuss the duty of writers to ignore those prescriptions and create expressive works of honesty and thoughtfulness. Most importantly, we'll identify strategies for writing beyond the taboos, examining excerpts by various taboo-shirking authors. You'll leave the session with stronger tools for writing into the headwinds, and to explore in your writing what you really think.