current offerings
📅 28 October, 4 & 11 November, 2026
🕜 6-8pm GMT [more time zones]
🤸🏻 with Sam Amsler
💷 £75 for 3 online workshops, recordings & course materials [find your currency here]
FACILITATOR
Is love a place we fall into? If love is a verb, what are different ways of loving doing in (and to) the world? What futures open up when we fall out with modern human love stories & fall in with life’s many other signatures and scores for affection, care and continuance?
WHAT IS THIS COURSE ABOUT?
The course combines creative writing exercises, spirited reading, embodiments & conversation, diving heart-first into the poetics and politics of falling in love. It extends an invitation to question human-centred, hierarchical, exclusive & nuclear cultures of feeling in our writing & relations. It is a call to cuddle up with queer kinds of commitment that centre collective health and provide alternative structures to progression, permanence or perfection. We’ll witness, feel & rewrite colonial sensibilities of friendship, family, romance, sex & care, and craft antidotes to toxins leached into our relations by monoculture, human exceptionalism, cisheteropatriarchy, white supremacy & the commodification, expropriation & exile of the erotic. The course is queer & ecological by nature, transfeminist by design. Vibes are: sacred-political creative practice; land defending land; love, gifts & labours of.
HOW WILL IT WORK?
The course is organised around scores, or prompt-like instructions for action and experimentation. It untethers and reassembles the words ‘fall,’ ‘in’ & love’ to create a score for writing with the raw material from the ruins of modern love’s demolition. It aims to support the creation of place-based text scores (and scores in other forms) for living and loving that uplift queer, living-systems principles of distributed affection and care. It is also an exercise in what So Sinopoulos-Lloyd of Queer Nature calls apocalyptic ecology: ‘the beholding of ecological relationships in times of rapid change, where hybridization and even mutation can sometimes emerge as (eco)systemic survival strategies.’
COURSE OVERVIEW
The score: fall / in / love │ The basis for the course is a text score of movements choreographed with three words—fall, in and love—& a nomadic comma (,) that modulates three modalities of relating, through a compendium of miniature scores.
session 1/ fall in love /
In this session, we’ll move through some of the histories & politics
of ‘falling in love’ as a social experience & institution. We’ll scale-jump
from the personal to the planetary. We’ll explore how intimacy
has been captured & controlled as a technology for colonisation,
& revel in movements that expand & channel its liberation.
session 2/ fall, in love /
In this session, we focus on learning from what love unsettles as
well as from what it secures. This is an invitation to intentionally trust
the fall: out of step with scripts that constrain our connections
with each other, across borders that enclose intimacy,
towards queer trans ecologies & courageous care.
session 3/ fall in, love /
In this session, we’ll turn to look at love stories written with the land,
for revolution & collective survival, rooted in committing beyond
both convenience & romance. The ‘call to arms’ embraces James
Baldwin’s and bell hooks’ reminder that love is a verb, and joins us in
Gabes Torres’ prayer: ‘may I love in ways that devastatingly disrupt
organized state violence’ and other systems of oppression.
FORMAT
We'll write our own scores for ‘loving wide /in/ a world on fire,’ guided by the teachings we receive from the Earth and Cosmos, by historical traditions of radical relating, and by text score practice of Pauline Oliveros and others. Other writing, drawing & somatic exercises take their inspiration from land-based writers & language practices such as Cecilia Vicuña’s palabrarmas, Gloria Anzaldúa’s conocimiento & ‘metaphors in the tradition of the shaman,’ Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ anscestral and animist listening practices, Sophie Strand’s queer-ecological love stories, Cleo Woelfle-Hazard’s ecopoetics of love and grief for rivers and fish, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s work on nature’s pronouns, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s relation with land & water as pedagogy, the Beyond Form Writing with Non-monogamy curriculum, & a range of poetry, science communication, and storytelling.
MORE INFORMATION
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I’ve been asking this question for a few years, observing and feeling how capitalist, patriarchal and heteronormative narratives of falling in love limit our ways of relating with each other, land, power and futures. And I’ve been observing and feeling how learning to love in more ecological ways across all our relations can help us be more loving (i.e. decolonising) part(ner)s of life in general. Because the Earth and Cosmos are replete with tenacious, mystical & generous wisdoms of interdependence. Yet across the planet, ecosystems & nervous systems are desecrated, stressed & inflamed. Existing in a cauldron of end-game racial petrocapitalism, climate convulsions, necropolitical regimes & spiritual heartbreak calls on us to love in ways that both emulate & protect thriving life. But the routes to love that are available to us in modern society often lead us away from its roots & our most visceral needs & desires. Falling in love in this state (and the State) often means falling into the very traps we’re trying to avoid. Settler sex, heteronormative rules of intimacy, and mononormative hierarchies of affection & care may promise security, comfort & belonging. But they keep us invested in shares of domination whose spell is to separate us from the queer, more-than-human relationships & commitments that we need to keep us alive & to defend the conditions that make life possible. I want to be leaning into them, learning our shared languages, together.
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Fall in, Love is for anyone who’s aspiring to queer love for hard times (and just to be clear: I am only aspiring). It might be especially interesting for writers, artists, health and intimacy practitioners, critical theorists and anyone who is navigating spiritually, politically and ecologically queer relationship in their communities and lives.
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This course uplifts a distinction between an infinite universe of ‘love with romance, tenderness, kindness, passion, etc.’ & the modern (heteronormative, mononormative & racial capitalist) culture & institution of romantic love that lumps all these experiences into a single type of relationship or even a single human being and enshrines it as care. Geni Núñes, in her critical account Descolonizando afetos: experimentações sobre outras formas de amar (Decolonising Affections: Experiments on Other Ways of Loving), reminds us the latter is a ‘type of love that is historically dated and marked by, among other factors, an idea of completeness/complementarity that only occurs in a certain way at a certain time. In common sense, it is associated with one’s “other half” (metada de laranja, half of the orange) or “soulmate” (tampa de panela, pot lid) & the expectation that it will last forever.’ The course offers gestures towards disinvesting from the mythologies of modern romance so we can better recognise and tend to love with romance.
SHORT COURSE
‘Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes about the (marine mammal) school as a “scale of intimacy at which we can care for each other and move together.” This inspires me to think about the different shapes of care in which we thrive in disturbed and lively habitats, the relational ecoystems that support our interdependence, and what happens to our cpacities for loving as we learn to become part of them.’
Sam Amsler (@ssamsler) is an eco-social researcher, essayist, poet, editor, educator and land steward in training. Their work aspires to ways of knowing that restore queer, life-bearing ways of living and loving from within colonialism’s ruins, and seeks to interrupt modern binaries, supremacies and separations across forms and scales. They co-steward Beyond Form Creative Writing and the Spiritual-Social Medicinal Apothecary. Sam holds a PhD in the colonial politics of knowledge and previously held professorial posts in sociology and education in the UK (2007-2023). Raised in Delaware, U.S. on ancestral Lenni Lenape and Nanticoke lands, they live transversally in Lisbon and between the Serra do Açor and Serra da Estrela in central Portugal.