Dust off your pen, paper, and laptop by joining Karla Comanda for an evening of writing in a virtual space! Using prompts and writing exercises based on music, Filipino folk poetry, and more, Karla will guide participants in reflecting on their experiences within the diaspora during the pandemic in this two-hour generative workshop. The workshop invites the participants to feel all the feels and to focus on the process of writing, rather than coming out of the workshop with something "good," and writing "correctly." 

Participants will come out of the workshop with images, phrases, lines, fragments, or paragraphs that they can use now or save for later. Resources will be shared at the end of the workshop for ways to sustain the participants’ writing practice and how they can get their poems out into the world. This workshop is open to writers of all levels and experiences in the Filipinx community. The workshop is limited to 15 participants. 

Karla Comanda (she/they) is a poet, editor, translator, educator, and arts administrator. Born and raised in the Philippines, she is spending her quarantine listening to Tito music, aka middle-of-the-road, soft rock music that should've been left in the 1970s but enjoys an enduring popularity in the Philippines. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Contemporary Verse 2, filling station, Room Magazine, Poetry is Dead, among others. She thinks that wearing dresses and skirts exclusively is a personality trait. In 2019, she hosted the Sinag-Araw Writing Workshop, a poetry workshop series created for Filipino youth in the diaspora. Do not get on her bad side or she will put a hex on you in her poetry.