A Virtual Workshop with Leila C. Nadir
Lyric essays break from traditional form by experimenting with musicality, nonlinearity, poetry, myth, speculation, fragmentation, association—because sometimes our stories demand innovative structures, especially when our lived experiences are haunted by absences caused by injustice, erasures, silences, overwhelm, loss, violence, frustration, and anger. This seminar will study and practice one lyric essay form in particular—the Ready-Made Resistance Essay (more popularly known as the "hermit crab" essay).
The Ready-Made Resistance Essay appropriates a found or ready-made structure from our every lives—grocery lists, prescription forms, media articles, professional documents (the possibilities are infinite)—and inhabits, disrupts, mis-uses, and occupies them with our own lived experiences. The Ready-Made form creates an automatic structure that performs liminality, belonging and unbelonging, truth and propaganda, unsettling power, narrative, and history. We will look at essays like Gwendolyn Wallace's "Math 1619," Nadia Owusu's "Refugee Resettlement Form," Rowan McCandless's "Blood Tithes: A Primer," and more. Through generative exercises, students will leave with a draft of their own ready-made resistance essay that will act as a personal-political document of the hypocrisies and horrors—as well as the possibilities for critique, creativity, and liberation—in this historical moment.
Where: Online via Zoom
Date: Thursday, April 9, 2026
Time: 19:30-21:30 CEST
Fees: CHF 30 (Members) | CHF 45 (Non-Members)
Leila Christine Nadir is an Afghan-American artist and writer whose work appears in literary and scholarly journals, in museums and galleries, and in forests, classrooms, and kitchens. Her writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Khôra, Black Warrior Review, North American Review, Asian American Literary Review, ASAP, and Aster(ix), and has been supported by awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, Tin House, the de Groot Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Aspen Words, and Maine Arts Commission. She holds a PhD in English & Comparative Literature and is the Founding Director of one of the first Environmental Humanities academic programs in the nation. She is currently environmental section editor at Los Angeles Review of Books.
