Write What Haunts You with Sabina Khan-Ibarra
Most writers have something they cannot stop writing about.
A house. A person. A childhood moment. A body of water. A question that never gets answered. An object that keeps appearing. A place we left. A life we almost lived. Sometimes we worry we’ve already written about these things too much. But what if repetition is not a failure of imagination? What if it is showing us where the deepest material lives?
In this four-week generative class, we will explore creative obsession: the subjects, images, memories, questions, and desires that return to our writing again and again. Rather than forcing ourselves toward entirely new material, we’ll learn how to approach recurring subjects from different angles and discover what they still have to reveal.
Through contemporary readings, discussion, and generative exercises across poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, students will experiment with recurrence, image systems, and shifts in perspective, time, and distance. We’ll consider how writers return to the same material without simply repeating themselves, and how an obsession can become a body of worthwhile work. Students will have opportunities to share new writing and receive supportive feedback, though sharing will be optional. The emphasis will be on generating new work rather than formal critique.
Students will:
* identify recurring subjects, images, questions, and patterns in their own writing;
* experiment with approaching familiar material from new perspectives;
* use repetition and recurrence intentionally;
* explore how time and distance can change the meaning of a subject;
* examine how writers build larger bodies of work around enduring obsessions;
* generate new work each week and leave with multiple drafts to continue developing.
Sabina Khan-Ibarra is a Pakistani Pashtun American writer, poet, and educator whose work explores family, memory, migration, faith, and inheritance across poetry and prose. 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. Sabina holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University and also teaches creative writing with San Diego Writers, Ink, and Litquake.