Writing Disasters, Writing Dreamscapes 6-Week Multi-Genre Zoom Workshop, Starts Wednesday, September 10th, 2025

Begins Wednesday, September 10th, 2025 Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Wednesdays, 6:00PM EST - 9:00PM EST. Now Enrolling! Any questions about this class? Use the Chat Button (lower left) to talk with us. Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is the author of several collections of poetry, including If This Is the Age We End Discovery (March 2021), which won the Alice James Award and was a Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. In 2023, she received a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant to write The Atomic Sonnets, a full-length poetry collection based on her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets (Black Warrior Review, 2020). A new book, The Last Great Adventure Is You, is forthcoming in 2027 from Alice James Books. Her work appears in POETRY, The Writer's Chronicle, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, NPR’s The Slowdown, AGNI, Poetry Society of America (PSA), The Poetry Review (UK), Poetry Wales, Poetry Daily, Tin House, among others. Her poem “Dancing with Kiko on the Moon” was recently featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. As humans continue to evolve— and with that, our belief systems, institutional structures and reliance on technology — how do we balance our thirst for discovery and progress, our curiosity and ingenuity, with a larger responsibility to ourselves and future generations? In this 6-week course geared to writers of all genres, we will explore the foundation of life itself in the simplest of particles like the electron to the nuclear superheavies, the dreaded possibility of nuclear winter, both utopias and (post)-apocalyptic landscapes, and how the written word and the very page might serve as both labyrinth and key to unraveling alternate futures. We will read work from writers like Primo Levi, Cormac McCarthy, Carl Sagan, Ursula K. Le Guin, Kyle Dargan, along with suggested viewing of films like Threads, Solaris, Demon Seed and more. *All work will be provided through links or uploads. COURSE OUTLINEWeek 1: Welcome to the Class! Class Overview + 3 Craft Exercises Week 2: Base :: Element[al] "Palladium" Faisal Mohyuddin (Pleiades) Selections from The Periodic Table Primo Levi (trans. by Raymond Rosenthal) "Periodic Table: from Sketch to Masterpiece" Tom Siegfried (Science News) Suggested Viewing: Investigating the Periodic Table with Experiments (The Royal Institution (UK)) Week 3: Ma(n) || chine “The Robots are Coming” Kyle Dargan (Poetry) "Night Journey of the Dragon-Horse" Xia Jia (trans. by Ken Liu) - from Invisible Planets and featured in Lightspeed The Robots Are Coming (Kyle Dargan's poem over at Motionpoems) "5 AI Predictions For The Year 2030" Rob Toews (Forbes) Suggested Viewing: Demon Seed Week 4: {Nuclear} Winters "this beginning may have always meant this end" Camille T. Dungy (Poetry) Selections from The Road by Cormac McCarthy "Nuclear Winter" Carl Sagan (Parade) "When Carl Sagan Warned the World About Nuclear Winter" Matthew R. Francis (Smithsonian Magazine) Suggested Viewing: Threads (1984) Week 5: On || Living "On Living" Nazim Hikmet (Academy of American Poets) "There Are Birds Here" Jamaal May (Poetry) "Living and Writing in A Time of Planetary Extinction" Olivia Parkes (Electric Lit) "How to Build a New Kind of Utopia" Ursula K. Le Guin (Electric Lit) Suggested Viewing: Solaris (1972) Week 6: A Full Day of Revisiting || Revising COURSE TAKEAWAYS: Explore various scientific and technological concepts like nuclear winter, doomsday device, superheavy elements and artificial intelligence. Examine candidly what might make a world utopian or dystopian, and why those lines are often blurred. Create new work that reflects unique worlds and futures of each writers' evolving vision. TESTIMONIALS:"When I started Rosebud’s workshop, I was looking to nurture a flare for creative writing that was in serious danger of dying out. Luckily, she was the perfect teacher to stoke that fire. Beyond putting together a syllabus that stretched our concepts of what poetry could be, she encouraged me and my peers to dip into the strange and the silly as we interpreted the prompts we were given. Her celebration of our growth and her thoughtful questions also gave me a model for feedback that I continue to employ when working through new writing with friends. I recommend to just about everyone I know that they try taking a workshop with Rosebud: she's a poet's poet, a teacher's teacher, and a champion for the kind of exploration, creativity, and fun that I needed to fall in love with writing again." -Patrick Mullen-Coyoy, former student"Poetry workshop with Rosebud was a wonderfully exciting and supportive space where I felt safe enough to experiment and take risks with my poems. Her writing prompts provoked me to ask deeper questions of myself and the class helped me grow immensely, both as a reader and a poet. The syllabus was rich in poetry, essays, music, and videos that encouraged lively classroom discussion and powerful, engaged writing. What strikes me most about Rosebud is her big-hearted generosity and genuine interest and delight in having her students succeed." -Yamini Pathak, former student"Rosebud is by far one of the best mentors I’ve had in a workshop setting. Her materials are thought-provoking and inspirational, and they challenge students to explore, play, and experiment. Her comments are always insightful and she creates a supportive environment where students are encouraged to be themselves, as well as to interact with each other both within and beyond the workshop. She’s generous in her feedback and with the time she dedicates to each student and is always willing to answer questions and help in any way she can." -Leonora Simonovis, Former student, winner of the Prairie Schooner Prize ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE: This class meets weekly via Zoom. Come prepared for a super fun class with live interaction on Zoom each week and plenty of writing, reading, and talking! PAYMENT OPTIONS: Tuition is $395. You can pay for the course in full  or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout. Instructor: Rosebud Ben-Oni Begins Wednesday, September 10th, 2025 Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Wednesdays, 6:00PM EST - 9:00PM EST. Tuition is $395 USD. Contact us HERE if you have any questions about this class.