Online | Open-Genre | Workshop

1-Day Generative Open-Genre Workshop: Becoming Monsters

Horror movie monsters often articulate the cultural anxieties of their time. They have the power to reflect, reinforce, and sometimes resist, prevailing notions of gender, morality, justice and beauty. 
Asking what makes a monster scary often tells us a lot about what society fears.


In this generative workshop, Tania De Rozario shares her love of horror films and feminine monstrosity and will show how, as a queer woman, empathising with female monsters helped her discover new ways to tell her stories. 


This single-session course will focus on helping participants use horror, myth, and monsters to discover news ways to tell their own stories. It will comprise a short warm-up exercise, a 20-minute presentation, 50 minutes of guided writing focusing on persona, and an opportunity to share the writing that was generated during the session.

This class is open to writers of all experience levels.

Class meetings will be held over video chat, using Zoom accessed from your private class page. While you can use Zoom from your browser, we recommend downloading the desktop client so you have access to all platform features. The Zoom calls will have automated transcription enabled. Please let us know ([email protected]) if you have any questions or concerns about accessibility.

Check out this page for details about payment plans and discount opportunities.  

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

- My hope is that participants will walk away having had a fun/meaningful experience, ideally with a new or enriched perspective on horror and/or horror films

- Generate new, exciting writing during class time

- Discover new "paths" into your writing process and new ways to tell your own stories

- 10% discount on all future Catapult classes

COURSE EXPECTATIONS:

Students should be prepared to participate in generative writing exercises during class time. There is no formal feedback given in this course, but students will have the opportunity to share work generated in class outloud if they desire.

Tania De Rozario

Tania De Rozario is a writer, visual artist and author of three books. And The Walls Come Crumbling Down (Gaudy Boy, 2020 / Math Paper Press, 2016) was a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Tender Delirium (Math Paper Press, 2013) was on the shortlist for the 2014 Singapore Literature Prize. Her work has won the New Ohio Review Nonfiction Contest (2020), the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest (2021), Singapore’s Golden Point Award (2011), and has made the “Notable” list of Best American Essays (2021). Her essay collection, Dinner on Monster Island, comes out with Harper Perennial in 2024.

Testimonials

"Real estate is a perennial hot-button issue in land-scarce Singapore. Tania De Rozario ingeniously flips this subject on its head in her memoir, asking us to consider how much more it takes to create a home than bricks and mortar. Rather than orderly floor plans and the neat lines of HDB estates, we are presented with the full messiness of human existence. What makes one apartment a safe haven and another a prison? In pellucid, lyrical prose, this heart-wrenching book wanders through the rooms of its author’s memory.”

Jeremy Tiang author of STATE OF EMERGENCY

"A lyrical prose memoir that is a combination of searing emotional intensity and powerful literary evocations, it draws you close with intimate yet unsentimental disclosures, and disrupts any or all presumptions you might have about home, family and love."

Lydia Kwa author of THE WALKING BOY

“These pages contain a series of interlocking short pieces that reach right into your guts and squeeze them, artfully and without mercy. I’m not sure how De Rozario manages to unwrap topics like abandonment, exclusion, loss, dementia, family, religion, homophobia, heartbreak, and searching for home without so much as a whiff or a sliver of sentimentality, yet she does. But there is poetry to be found here, too, and lines so beautiful I had to jot them down to be revisited later. Some of these sentences were crafted with near surgical precision, and sliced clean through the ribcage to reveal the author’s battered but still thumping heart.”

Ivan Coyote author of REBENT SINNER