Join us for a free, generative writing workshop for trans writers, led by Max Delsohn!
Workshop topic -
How To "Kill Lies:" Writing Against Received Language
Nico Walker, the infamous bankrobber-turned-novelist, once wrote in Bookforum, "Any writer worth a fuck should be in the business of killing lies." This generative writing workshop will consider the clichés, disinformation, and reductive language that plague minority writers specifically and employ them as writing prompts. We will begin by looking at some remarkable lie-killers across identity groups and history (potential writers include Torrey Peters, Andrea Long Chu, Imogen Binnie, Kay Gabriel, Leslie Feinberg, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Ralph Ellison, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, Charles Yu, Mosab Abu Toha, and Nafissa Thompson-Spires) and finish with a writing exercise in which we, as trans artists, write directly against and past the language wrongly applied to us.
Max Delsohn’s writing appears in McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, VICE, Joyland, The Rumpus, and Triangle House, among other places. His debut short story collection, Crawl, about trans men in Seattle during the 2010s, will be published by Graywolf Press on Oct. 21, 2025. He earned his MFA in fiction from Syracuse University. He lives in Los Angeles.
Lilac Peril is a DC-based small press by and for trans writers, with a particular focus on the subversive and experimental.
