Creative Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World

  • Wednesday, January 27, 2021
  • Wednesday, February 17, 2021
  • 4 sessions
  • Wednesday, January 27, 2021, 10:00 AM 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Wednesday, February 03, 2021, 10:00 AM 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Wednesday, February 10, 2021, 10:00 AM 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Wednesday, February 17, 2021, 10:00 AM 12:00 PM (EST)
  • Digital Village
  • 0

Registration

  • For Global Registration, use the discount code provided to you.
  • IWWG Members Register here
  • Non-members of IWWG register here

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Special Event
4-Week Series

Creative Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World
a 4-week multi-genre creative writing class with Anya Achtenberg
Fiction, memoir/creative nonfiction, poetry, essay, hybrid forms

“I want to rediscover the secret of great speech, and of great burning.” 
Aime Cesaire, Notebook of a Return to The Native Land


 In 4 transformative weeks, you’ll be introduced to a reframing of creative writing craft that affirms its profound interconnection with our longing for social justice. The innovative approaches will help you expand your own web of associations, your creative terrain, your power to investigate the worlds of your writing; helping you reach, for example, what may have seemed invisible—the hidden cost, the hidden crime, the hidden gifts—the hidden story. 
 
The brief reading selections for class are far-reaching, multicultural and interdisciplinary —they don’t merely illustrate that extraordinary craft can be intertwined with concerns for social, economic and environmental justice—but how. You’ll acquire many tools to help you express your deepest concerns, including techniques for writing what may seem too enormous or too painful to attempt; ways to rediscover and recontextualize language; the use of loaded words, metaphors of critique, and concentric circles, to bring context forward; and the tool of imaginative knowing. Then, for writing during and between classes, you’ll be offered a series of explorations (not simply exercises!) known to pull forth streams of surprising and beautiful writing. Together we will examine some of what is at the heart of writing that can break the social silences, recover people’s history, reveal connections among all things and beings, and re-dream a just world.

Materials useful for the first class will be emailed to registrants during the week before our starting date.

All levels of experience welcome.
 

A dream can be the highest point of a life.
Nigerian writer Ben Okri, The Famished Road
 
 
The workshop offers material from the first course in my Creative Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World Workshop Series, which includes Place and Exile/Borders and Crossings; Yearning and Justice: Writing the Unlived Life; Writing IS/AS Resistance; and Body Stories, Body Song, and the Elements of Story Craft; and others.

With questions about the course, contact Anya at thedisobedientwriter@gmail.com  

For descriptions of some of the Re-Dream Series, see: https://thedisobedientwriter.com/courses-and-workshops/writing-for-social-change-re-dream-a-just-world-workshops/


Anya Achtenberg

I am an award-winning fiction writer/poet; author of Blue Earth (a novel), The Stories of Devil-Girl (a novella); and poetry books, The Stone of Language, and I Know What the Small Girl Knew. I am currently completing another novel, History Artist, centering in characters converging after the Khmer Rouge regime, around a young Cambodian/African American woman born at the start of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia; and a book of poetry, Matadors at the CrossingMy international creative writing teaching offers creatively expansive and cutting-edge approaches through my Writing for Social Change: Re-Dream a Just World Workshop Series, and, The Disobedient Writer Workshop Series. Also, a manuscript consultant and coach. And I'm zooming like crazy these days.