How can writing undo monogamous ways of thinking, being, doing and relating? How is our writing constrained by calcified and normative forms, fears and fantasies about what writing should be and where it should go? Who and what are tied down and twisted by abject human-centred imaginaries, mono-graphs, the ‘marriage plot,’ the imperative of prescribed genres, heteronormative romanticization and happy endings, boring kinds of climax, delusions of linear time, single stories, coherent characters, pleasurable or painful discernments, and the terror of loose ends? How can we write in ways that are more faithful to our already abundant, complex but often invisible and excluded relational ecologies?

In ‘writing with non-monogamy,’ a collaboration with Dr Sarah Amsler, we ask how we can write through more capacious forms of relationality than are afforded to us by grammars of compulsory monogamy.

We’re interested in queer kinds of commitment and the affordances of different languages, forms and practices for non-monogamous writing: graphomania’s passion for proliferation; queer etymology’s intimacy with plurality, subversive, subsumed, ost, forgotten, denied, minor meanings, more-than-human, earth-and-cosmos-based, nonbinary, relational grammar and participants, and the disruptive connections of erotic forces and flows.

Writing with non-monogamy currently takes the form of a 5-part workshop series, run with Beyond Form Creative Writing. In 2024, we’re planning to form this work into other shapes.