Courses & Events

Quentin S. Crisp comes to Weirdosphere this Halloween to speak about the supernatural both as a subject literature sometimes takes up and as something literature might itself ultimately be. Along the way, he’ll draw a line between the otherworldly atmosphere of supernatural horror and the Japanese aesthetic of yuugen and show how fiction uses the ordinary workings of language to point towards thing that lie beyond ordinary experience. Join us as we wander into literature’s haunted pages with this singular fiction author, essayist, and poet.

This event starts October 31.

In October, Erik Davis returns to Weirdosphere to guide us through a close and prophetic reading of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, one of Dick’s most explicitly ethical novels, and best known as the novel that formed the basis for Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Davis will present Dick’s work and life in the late 1960s and lay out some of the novel’s major themes. We will be reading the novel not so much as fiction or science fiction but as a prophetic lens on today’s polycrisis, aspects of which resonate uncannily with Dick’s philosophical and visionary concerns.

This course is in progress and expected to finish on October 25.

For a limited time, MC101: Writing at the Wellspring, with author Matt Cardin, will accept new student enrollment. Offered for the first time as a self-paced course, MC101 goes beyond the typical writing or creativity workshop. Students delve into the concept and experience of creativity as an inner collaboration with a separate force or intelligence within the psyche and examine ways to understand and navigate the tension between the drive to create and what can sometimes feel like an opposite impulse toward total stillness and inactivity that can accompany spiritual insight.

This course concluded in December 2024 and is now self-paced.