To Imagine a Form of Life was a four-part virtual class exploring memory work and lesbian poetics. The program is organized by DC-based curator and writer Fabiola Ching alongside her collaborators from Hermetic State, a literary hub for black lesbians.

Through hands-on workshops and language exercises, they posed questions about the ways we learn about survival and bodily excavation; whose movements of love did our bodies learn to mimic?

The class included original writing and workshops by Oreoluwa Akinyode, Mayah Lovell, Fabiola Ching, and Adaeze Okere and is inspired by Afronowism theory, black lesbian esoterics, and the work of June Jordan. Graphic illustrations are by Saizami Tripathi.

Digital Zine

To archive this project, we published a digital zine on Are.na that can be accessed here.

Virtual Workshops

This is Memory… with Fabiola Ching
Saturday, January 29, 2022 from 3:00–5:00pm
This class will explore the uses of imagery, unorthodox word pairing, elocution, and punctuation as a method of creating language and definitions yet unearthed. Fabiola Ching will share examples from authors such as Laurie Weeks, Pamela Sneed, Eileen Myles, as well as TV shows and films to illustrate the ways we can dramatically communicate memories and stories. Through this course, she hopes to collectively encourage writing to be dreamlike, scary, thick, and most importantly, true.

Baby Mi (My Baby) with Oreoluwa Akinyode
Saturday, February 12, 2022 from 3:00–5:00pm
Storyteller and archivist Oreoluwa Akinyode will lead this workshop on crafting letters and poetry in order to nurture the younger versions of ourselves. They hope to create a bridge where we can pour love into all versions of ourselves that need(ed) love.

Writing Erotic Memory with Mayah Lovell
Saturday, February 26, 2022 from 3:00–5:00pm
Led by artist and writer Mayah Lovell, this workshop will explore the integration of the body and the poetics of erotica writing. It will include a body scan, a reading, and a guided writing session. Attendees will also receive a folder of writing excerpts. The outcomes of the class are to use erotica to create new memories for the body to hold onto.

Cross Mapping Memory with Adaeze Okere
Saturday, March 19, 2022 from 3:00–5:00pm
Led by sculptor and writer Adaeze Okere, participants will create their own sensory maps using common household items and the corresponding memories that they elicit. By mapping their emotions, the hope is that participants can begin to unravel dormant impressions and memories.

About the Participants

Oreoluwa Akinyode is a living breathing archive of life, death, and beyond. Oreoluwa tells stories, preserves stories, and cares for stories. With the use of images, moving images, and words Oreoluwa aims to craft worlds where their multitudes have a place to love, cry, and feeeeel. One of Oreoluwa’s main goals is to encourage other black gender-expansive youth to archive their lives, their loved ones, and to be their own archivist. To be the holder of you and your loved ones archives is to care for your existence beyond life and death.

Fabiola Ching is a literary curator and writer researching playful and lavish methods of publishing and communicating around literature. Their practice is guided by curiosity regarding what we have been taught; asking questions such as how can literature be used as a method of rest and enjoyment? What methods of learning and showing love have we not dreamed of yet? Inspired by Afro-nowism theory and their lifestyle as a black lesbian poet, Fabiola writes and curates programming aimed at exploring the ways that storytelling can translate to communal care and liberation within our current ecologies.

Mayah Lovell is a black lesbian latinx from suburban-area DC. Her artistic studies are synthesized by moiling essence through materials such as 2D visual arts, 3D structures, performance, and prose-poetry. The multidimensional planes of her work reveals the fluidity and vulnerability of lesbianism. These intimacies beckons the psyche of neo-erotica, computation, reclamation of science fiction paradigms, and African spiritualities as transformative resolutions. Lovell’s work is published both online and in print, including a self published chapbook. She has exhibited and performed in Baltimore, Connecticut, DC, and Philadelphia.

Adaeze Okere is a sculptor and writer from Prince George’s County, MD, now based in Detroit. Her practice centers around social etiquette in the digital realm as it relates to power hierarchies. Adaeze is especially interested in memes as material, believing that they are a crucial vehicle for understanding and reflecting collective psyches.