Queer Climate Cabaret: Writing with the Elements: A Generative Workshop

This October, Vital Matters is holding the Queer Climate Cabaret at Creative Alliance. In the two months leading up to the Cabaret, we welcome you to join our community conversation in an embodied, creative exploration of climate, queerness, and performance over three workshops. Go to www.vitalmatters.net or @_vital_matters_ for more information.

Workshops:

September 7: Drag King 101 w/ Pretty Boi Drag
September 28: Writing with the Elements: A Generative Workshop w/ Jacob Budenz
October 19: Climate, Queerness, and Performance 101 w/ Nigel Semaj, Jacob Marrero, & Michele Minnick

Burgeoning climate activists and seasoned environmental writers alike may wonder where to begin when faced with the mammoth task of tackling climate change through writing. In this generative workshop, queer author and performance artist Jacob Budenz will provide resources, space, and time to write with the elements, sharing tips on weaving climate activism into creative writing, making the political personal and the personal political, and creatively engaging with the existential threats to the natural world with an eye toward hope and connection. Located in the gardens of the Ivy Bookshop, Writing with the Elements will immerse participants in climate writing alongside the elements they wish to protect, offering participants the opportunity to share their writing around a fire at the workshop’s culmination.

Where: Ivy Bookshop, 5928 Falls Road, Baltimore, MD 21209
When: SAT SEP 28 | 3-6PM
Age Range: 16+
Cost: $15-75 Sliding Scale
Materials: Your favorite writing implements

Facilitator Bio
Jacob Budenz (they/them) is a queer author, grant-winning multidisciplinary performer, and witch with an MFA from University of New Orleans and a BA from Johns Hopkins University. Their work focuses on the intersection of otherness, the otherworldly, the environment, and the esoteric. The author of queer magic realist short story collection Tea Leaves (Amble/Bywater Books 2023) and poetry chapbook Pastel Witcheries (Seven Kitchens Press 2018), Budenz has puplished fiction and poetry in print journals including Slipstream and Assaracus; zeitgeisty online journals including Taco Bell Quarterly and Wussy Mag, and lauded anthologies by Mason Jar Press, Unbound Edition, Lycan Valley Publications. As a theater artist, Jake has received a Baker Innovative Projects Grant to produce and perform Simaetha: a Dreambaby Cabaret at the Carroll Mansion, has been involved in numerous Best of Baltimore winning productions as an actor and director, composed music for post-colonial climate movement opera At the Water’s Edge, and appeared on Baltimore City Paper’s Top Ten Staged Productions of 2016 for writing and directing an original adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. You can follow Jake’s queer psychedelic pop band Moth Broth (@mothbrothband) on Instagram or Jake’s individual work as an artist @dreambabyjake or www.jakebeearts.com