Catalysis: Creative Chemical Reaction with Janice Lee & Lidia Yuknavitch

The term "catalyst" is derived from Greek καταλύειν, kataluein, meaning "loosen" or "untie." Are you feeling stuck in your work-in-progress? Or maybe not stuck, but conflicted? At a crossroads? Maybe you've just been wandering through it for so long that you wish you had an outside perspective to help you navigate. (We know—writing can be lonely work!) With Catalysis, Janice & Lidia offer an opportunity for a session of creative chemical reaction.

How it works: You’ll transmit up to 20 pages of work one week ahead of your session with Janice and Lidia. This work could be fiction, nonfiction, hybrid, or poetry; it can be a stand-alone essay/story draft or an excerpt from a longer book-length work. After they've had one week to look at it together, Janice & Lidia will log on for a 45-minute Zoom meeting with you in which they'll offer reflections, feedback, and ideas that percolated up for them as they took in your work. All feedback will be verbal, not written, but they'll leave you with a one-page sheet of portals (our word for "prompts") keyed into your project to help keep you moving and exploring your own work.

Register your interest using the form below. You’ll be contacted by our Navigator, Daniel, who will invoice you directly and work to get you on the calendar. Currently Booking Summer + Fall 2025. Sessions will be scheduled on a rolling basis, working within Janice and Lidia’s fluctuating schedules.

Cost: $500. The refund deadline for cancellations will be one day before your pages turn-in date. While payment plans are available, this is one of the very few offerings for which Corporeal Writing does not offer scholarships/sliding scale/reduced rates.

Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the short story collection Verge (Riverhead Books), the novels The Book of Joan (Harper Books), The Small Backs of Children (Harper Books), and Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books), and the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books). Her TED Talk "On the Beauty of Being a Misfit" has received over 3 million views, and spawned The Misfit Manifesto (TED Books/Simon and Schuster). She lives and collaborates in Portland, Oregon at Corporeal Writing. She is a very good swimmer.

Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of 8 books of fiction, creative nonfiction & poetry, most recently Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). She writes about interspecies communication, plants & personhood, the filmic long take, slowness, the apocalypse, architectural spaces, inherited trauma, and the Korean concept of han, and asks the question, how do we hold space open while maintaining intimacy? Lee teaches workshops on inherited trauma, healing and writing, bringing together elements from several different lineages as a mesa-carrying practitioner of the Q’ero tradition of medicine work and as a practitioner of Zen Buddhism (in the tradition of Plum Village and Thich Nhat Hanh). She also incorporates elements of ancestral healing, Korean shamanic ritual (Muism), plant medicine & flower essence work, card readings & divination, and interspecies communication. She currently lives in Portland, OR where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. She can be found online at http://janicel.com and Twitter/Instagram: @diddioz.