A Writing Workshop for the Age of Emergency with Monica Byrne

Course Summary

The workshop is open to all—professional writers, hobbyists, or just folks interested in using imagination as a social tool—to uncover the vast possibilities of human existence that global authoritarians would have us forget. The course will de-emphasize feedback on writing, and emphasize personal attunement.

Course Outline

We’re living through a hell of a global moment: what I call the Age of Emergency. Sometimes it feels overwhelmingly bleak. But, ultimately, hopelessness serves power.

One of the greatest tools we have to combat hopelessness is imagination. Imagination is the root of all social change. Someone had to see how the world could be before it came into being. Women’s suffrage, trans rights, and anticolonial revolution are now revered as if they were a given, but they’re rarely celebrated at the time. Money, race, nation states—we are surrounded by fictions. We have the power to change them.

In this workshop, through short readings and exercises, moving from the deep past to the deep future, we will use imagination to enlarge our sense of possibility—and re-envision the world as it could be.

Course Outline (flexible):

Session I: The Past. 2 hours, with break.

-Identify your “poles”: Physical self-attunement as an instrument of writing

-Exercise 1: Writing toward your poles

-Exercise 2: Connecting with the deep past

-Exercise 3: Integrating 1 & 2

-Exercise 4: (only if time, and in person): A Boring Scene

Session II: The Present. 2 hours, with break.

-Warmup: Jailbreak

-Exercise 1: Most and Least

-Exercise 2: Speech! Speech!

Session III: The Future. 2 hours, with break.

-Warmup: Potter’s Wheel—creating characters, celebrating a birthday

-Exercise 1: Ten years in the future, and cake

-Exercise 2: A thousand years in the future, and cake

-Exercise 3: The last two humans alive, and cake

Will participants be expected to produce work and if so, how often?

Only in class. If they’d like to share their work, they’re free to do so outside class at their own arrangement. There will also be short readings before each class, by Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba, Walidah Imarisha, Aaron Bady, Diane di Prima, and possibly others.

Course Outcomes

My hope is that participants will leave this course with a deep sense of possibility, for their own lives and for the world—a sense that they can always access, even in the moments of deepest despair.

Monica Byrne is a science fiction writer from the United States. She earned degrees in biochemistry from Wellesley College and MIT, but then pivoted to art; afterward, she spent seventeen years writing, performing, and organizing in Durham, North Carolina. In 2022, she left the country to live on the road for three years, before settling in Ireland. She is currently working on a Masters of Creative Practice degree at the Yeats Academy, ATU-Sligo.

Booked out? To be added to the waiting list for this course, please email info@irishwriterscentre.ie.