Writing Into Vulgarity — Poetry, Desire, and Excess with Patrick DeLeon

Class Description: A dynamic monthly writing workshop designed to celebrate and nurture queer voices. Whether you're an experienced writer or just starting out, this workshop provides a supportive and inspiring environment for all participants.

This workshop explores what it means to write into vulgarity not as shock for its own sake, but as a way of reaching language that feels charged, excessive, and alive. We’ll treat vulgarity as a creative entry point where desire, voice, and tension push past what feels acceptable or controlled. Instead of cleaning up the poem, we’ll lean into what feels messy, risky, or too much, and use that pressure to generate something sharper and more honest.

Together, we’ll experiment with fast, intuitive writing that draws on conversation, memory, and fragments of speech. We’ll work with taboo or “improper” language, direct address, and collage to build poems that hold multiple voices and energies at once. Along the way, we’ll look at how a poem can pull a reader in while also unsettling them, creating that charged, hard-to-look-away-from feeling. By the end, you’ll leave with new drafts and a clearer sense of how writing into excess can open up your work and make it feel more alive, immediate, and impossible to ignore.

This workshop is open to all skill levels.

Location:The McKinley Club - 734 W Polk St, Phoenix, AZ 85007

Tickets: $10 tickets available online and at the door

Limited seating available, pay what you wish tickets will be available at the door.

All tickets are non-refundable and non-exchangeable.