Nocturnal Writing Workshop

Led by Vanessa Holyoak

July 11, 2026 | 7-9PM

LA Artcore | 120 Judge John Aiso St., Los Angeles, CA 90012

Join us for the closing event of Swollen with Life at LA Artcore, an evening of guided embodied writing into the space of night.

You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own.
You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée

During this evening of embodied writing rooted in sensory ecological experience, participants gather under darkness to explore what it means to write into the space of the night. Through guided prompts drawing on imagery, sounds, and scents, we engage our senses through automatic writing exercises attuned to the nighttime body. What shapes do our bodies make in the dark? What forms and ways of being emerge when sightlines are erased?

Taking cues from the concurrent exhibition "Swollen with Life" and its artists' multimodal evocations of fanstasy, desire, and delirium, we ask what the night reveals about the many places and times that inhabit us, culminating in an act of collective writing. The workshop cultivates a space for opaque unknowing, activating the physical architecture of LA Artcore space as a site of rest and reverie—an ecosystem in which our nocturnal sensibilities come alive.

Writers and artists curious about the intermedial intersections of body, night, and ecology are invited to join in this performative offering rooted in acts of shared dreaming, guided by the themes and practices behind artist/writer Vanessa Holyoak's own interdisciplinary engagements with the night.