Unbridled: An AI-Resistant Creative Writing Workshop

Welcome! I designed Unbridled as a workshop driven by my desire to resist AI as it homogenizes writing by separating us from our personal patterns of paying attention, systems of thinking, and styles of translating.

From the start, I’ve structured this workshop to support you, the human, by crafting an online sanctuary for you to slip away to on your own time, at your own pace, and whenever you choose.

Following completion of this workshop, you’re able to schedule a co-writing workshop with me over Zoom. The purpose of this format is to bring the best of both worlds together: one in which you’re given freedom, space, and solitude in your own process, and one where you get to write, share aloud, and receive feedback.

My own writing practice is sustained this way, divided between a writing life I maintain in private and meeting with a writing group over Zoom. The peers and mentors I write with, share with, and listen to after they’ve received my work are just as important, if not more so, than what I achieve alone. 

When we meet on Zoom, we’ll check in for a few minutes, go off camera and mic to write for an hour, then we’ll return to screen-share what we’ve written, and respond to each other’s work (if you’d like you get to give me notes on my writing, too—this part is optional but sometimes relieves anxiety about receiving without also responding). My workshop approach is always balanced between what’s working and where possibilities for revision exist. What I love about co-writing workshops is that you don’t actually have to come prepared with something you’ve previously written; just blocking off the time to show up for a meeting and an hour of writing is enough.

I titled this workshop Unbridled‍ ‍as a wish for you to remove whatever figurative bridles have constrained you in unproductive ways in your writing. While our focus here is proving how obsolete AI is in our creative writing lives, my passion is working with writers brushing up against all kinds of frustrations with their work: from limited beliefs about their writing to stagnancy in their writing routine. I’m as interested in the writing as I am in who a writer is off the page.

Allow this workshop to be straightforward, take what resonates, and leave the rest. By resisting AI in our writing lives, we recharge our intuition, return to nature, spirit, weirding out, and invent conditions that are productive to us, generating fresh writing.

The experience that first brought me to writing early in life was reading books that made me want to be friends with the people who wrote them, and the rabbit holes of research I went down after finishing those books, just to feel closer to them. Let’s carry this long-standing legacy forward by being those same writers. Writers who reach, move, and become sacred to someone we haven’t met yet. Writers who feel meditative, like spiritual encounters, like prayers, like it’s impossible to know where the work really comes from because it’s so deeply human and paradoxically, as if by God or myth or magic, beyond the physical too.

-AFP