FREE
Friday Free Write:
Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World
A Multi-Genre Writing Session with Anya Achtenberg
In this 90-minute session, we will work to expand our creative maps to spark and fuel the power of our writing, all the while nourishing our radical consciousness about how the world works, and the necessity of changing it. As we leap about in language, in story, following the many connections language reveals to us, we ’ll also expand the terrain of our writing, not as tourists, but in search of what has been hidden. In such a process, both liberating and focused by our deepest yearnings for justice, we often arrive at what was previously invisible. As we step off the old paths of writing formulae, false narratives and dead language, we arrive at our true connectedness to others and their experiences, and at the deeper causes of events and behaviors.
Moving about our expanding associative maps not only frees our more authentic voice, but also lands us at the aching truths of the world, frees us of historical amnesia, reveals the connectedness between what seems not to be connected, and stuns us with the expression of our liberated truths.
Will we do all this in one session? We will certainly begin to; we ’ll write a lot! and we will surprise ourselves.
Anya Achtenberg is the award-winning author of the novel Blue Earth, and novella The Stories of Devil-Girl (both with Modern History Press); and poetry books, The Stone of Language (West End Press); and I Know What the Small Girl Knew (Holy Cow! Press). Modern History Press has made all 4 books also available on Kindle, and Devil-Girl will soon be available againin audio. Anya’s fiction and poetry have received numerous prizes and distinctions and been widely published. She’s currently completing another novel, History Artist, which centers in a young woman of Cambodian and African American origins born at the moment the US invasion of Cambodia began; and another book of poetry, Matadors at the Crossing. Anya’s teaching and essays on writing craft go beyond writing conventions to develop creatively expansive and inclusive approaches reflecting the profound experiences and histories of communities that are diasporic and dislodged, disenfranchised, in resistance. An essay of hers is published in How Dare We! Write: a multicultural creative writing discourse (ed. Sherry Quan Lee), which was recently named one of the “Best Books for Writers of 2020” by Poets & Writers Magazine.
Anya has taught her cutting edge courses in person through universities, writer’s organizations, conferences and more. Her extensive online teaching has reached 60 countries and thousands of students to-date. Along with her numerous fiction and memoir workshops, her series of multi- genre workshops, Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World, has for decades moved writers to expand and deepen their craft and creativity in ways intimately connected to social justice issues. And she has long worked as a manuscript consultant and writing coach with extraordinary writers all over the world.
See Anya’s website, The Disobedient Writer, here: https://thedisobedientwriter.com
