Let It Be Strange with Sabina Khan-Ibarra

What if the strangest thing in your writing is the thing you should trust most?

A dead person speaks. A woman becomes a bird. Time collapses. An ordinary object carries impossible weight. An image defies logic but feels emotionally exact.

In this four-week generative class, we will explore what happens when writers embrace the unexpected, surreal, and uncanny, allowing images, experiences, and imaginative leaps to exist without immediately explaining them to the reader.

Each week, we will explore a different way writers make the unfamiliar feel necessary: defamiliarizing the ordinary, allowing the impossible into otherwise recognizable worlds, resisting the urge to explain every cultural reference or experience, and following associative or imaginative leaps that logic alone cannot make.

Through contemporary readings, discussion, and generative exercises, students will experiment across poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. There will be opportunities to share new writing and discuss what emerges, though sharing is always optional. The goal is not to make writing strange for strangeness’s sake, but to recognize when an unexpected choice opens a door that realism, explanation, or convention cannot.

Students will:

* experiment with defamiliarization and unusual perspectives;

* explore surreal, fabulist, and uncanny elements;

* practice incorporating culturally specific language, traditions, and references without over-explaining;

* use associative leaps, unexpected images, and imaginative logic;

* examine how to build enough trust for readers to follow unfamiliar choices;

* generate new work each week and leave class with multiple drafts to continue developing.

Note: there is no class on January 18th. 

Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, faith, and inheritance, often moving between realism, fabulism, and the surreal. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in AGNI, SWWIM Every Day, Anomaly, FERAL, and Panoply, among others, and has been named a strong semifinalist for the University of Wisconsin Press’s Brittingham and Felix Pollak Poetry Prizes, longlisted for Palette Poetry’s Love & Eros Prize, and shortlisted by SmokeLong Quarterly. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also teaches creative writing with San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake.