The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering

The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering is an incubator for community accountability, designing your creative ecosystem, and building a life that centers and supports your writing practice as non-negotiable.

That's right, we are no longer negotiating the terms of our breath. Which is to say we are no longer negotiating the terms of our desire, our writing. And the best part? You won't be engaging in this unapologetic audacity alone.

We'll be supporting you every step of the way through:

  • Live Monthly Writing Workshops: Based on the Erotic Engineering Compass, the workshops are a time blocked container for writing alongside black feminist literature, poetry and worldbuilding.
  • Live Monthly Open Studios: For reading your writing, reflecting on your writing practice and projects and receiving support and accountability from your peers.
  • The Erotic Engineering Manual: Your personal copy will feature writing prompts, resources, affirmations and spells inspired by black feminist literature, poetry and worldbuilding. A new chapter is added every month.
  • 1:1 Support: Through private text and voice memos on Discord. Reach out, talk through "writer's block" and request resources on areas of interest specific to your writing practice.
  • Group Support: From a global Discord community of writers, worldbuilders and erotic engineers. Find peers to co-work with, start a book club with, meet at a local coffee shop and more.
  • Collective Research: We maintain a collectively generated Are.na board to support our research practice. This expands and inspires our writing by exposing our practice to citations and footnotes beyond our own.

BONUS: Enroll by Thursday, August 21st and receive access to a library of 12 pre-recorded, guided black feminist breathwork meditations for nervous system regulation inside public practice and sacred witnessing.

Erotic Engineering is a wild field of study and practice that uses the erotic as power to build a life rooted in desire. Inside this practice the desire we center is both personal and collective. Erotic Engineering pulls from the work of black feminist poetry, literature and worldbuilding which provides the material we use to create new belief systems that scaffold lives in deeper alignment with our values. It is a method for actualizing desire through putting language to the longings of our interior worlds in order to transform our material world.

I hope you'll join us in writing and living into new experiments.

FAQ: There are no refunds after you have enrolled into The Laboratory of Erotic Engineering but you can cancel your membership at any time! We aim to practice with you for as long as it feels desirable and accessible. 🕯️

Image: The Sisterhood Members, 1977. (front row from left) Nana Maynard, Ntozake Shange, Louise Meriwether (back row from left) Vertamae Smart-Grosvenor, Alice Walker, Audrey Edwards, Toni Morrison and June Jordan. Alice Walker papers.

What Seeda School Alumni Are Saying:

Ayana's excavating groundwork reminds us that the ability to float already resides in the power of our expansive breath. If we can dream it, then it is safe to trust that it is already done for not just ourselves but folks dreaming of the work we are producing. The world you desire to build already exists within you & the worldbuilding framework helped me realize that our work can support so many others if we break through the fertile ground where we stand alone. In fact, through the worldbuilding framework, Ayana facilitates that we are never truly alone because the Sankofa sensibility circularly connects us to our past, present, & future. If you're ready to invite folks to wade into the sea of your worldbuilding & transformative offer then sign up! Trust that when it rains it pours & your abundant desires will grow & be witnessed by the outstretched limbs of folks in the Seeda School community with you.

Kay Brown, writer of "Assemblage: Baby's Breath" on Substack

Words cannot express enough how grateful I am for the blessing that is both Ayana and Seeda School. Enrolling in the retreat was an immediate yes for me — where the weekly meditations and facilitations from Ayana felt like sacred invitations to return — return to community, return to self, return to Spirit, return to our gardens. Like The Artist's Way, but through a decolonial Black feminist lens, I continue to find Seeda School and its Retreat as an evergreen gift and artistic nourishment that, as a result, enriches the tending of my spiritual and literary practice — The Conflicted Womanist.

Chinyere Erondu writer of "The Conflicted Womanist" on Substack

Seeda School is the most nourishing, electric, brilliant, inspired, held space I have been lucky enough to be a part of. I entered the retreat from the depths of a creative winter, and Ayana built the container for a true and revelatory spring. She has architected the balance of structure, rigorous tools, juicy inspiration, accountability, and relational support that will help you (finally) recognize and birth the thing that has been calling you. And more than that, Seeda is the invitation to manifest the luscious version of a life you didn’t know you were allowed to have.

Olivia Vagelos writer of "Designing For Feelings" on Substack

Ayana has created a thriving Black feminist counterpublic that combines the speculative imaginary with the power of presence and action to manifest worlds that exist outside of and beyond oppressive systems, reminding us that we don’t have to cut off any parts of ourselves in the work. I have found that accepting Ayana’s invitation into communal worldbuilding has completely transformed the way I think about both engaging with and funding my creative practice. Their gentle invocation around returning consistently to our work to build a nurturing cadence of outreach via the weekly dispatch, with its focus on curiosity and research, as well as their guidance on developing an income-generating offer has shown me the value of cultivating a creative ecosystem where all parts feed into and nourish each other. I came for the emphasis on grounding our art in interdisciplinary wildness and opacity. I stay for the soft weave of community that grounds us all together in what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls “an interdependent ceremony.” Ayana and my fellow worldbuilders are holding each other through this time of escalating genocide and rising fascism worldwide and together we are creating full universes of possibility to, in Christina Sharpe’s words, “imagine otherwise.” Join us?

Elliott Silverstein, writer of "Archive Fever Dream" on Substack

$67.00 USD

Every month

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