In this course led by Katherine Wela Bogen, students will develop concrete craft skills for writing embodied desire. They will learn grounding exercises that bring them into the body so they can access viscerality and sensation while writing, rather than staying in abstraction or plot. They will practice reading desire - seeking out authors and texts that genuinely turn them on - and studying how those writers use craft to generate heat. We will focus on anticipation, treating desire as fluid and cyclical rather than linear, and on writing directly by naming body parts and genitalia without euphemism. Throughout, students will learn to pair the interior and exterior worlds: sensation/somatics, thought, fantasy, and emotional charge alongside physical action. The course pushes back against externally oriented, plot-driven “sexy” writing that catalogs what characters do and say while neglecting the interiority of desire/sexuality. All of this happens on the inside.  

In her own words, Katherine Wela Bogen is “first, a storyteller; second, a scholar-activist; and third, a joyful little freak.” Bisexual and Jewish, she grew up in rural New England. A doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, studying the intersections of bisexual identity, sexual trauma, sexual functioning, and kink, she has published more than forty peer-reviewed papers and is the host of the political podcast SuperHumanizer. Bogen’s 600k+ social media followers will recognize her as @k.w.bogen from her public-facing scholar activism. Queering Him, the first in the Avra and Kieran trilogy, is Bogen’s debut novel.