Announcing our Flourish Fiction Summer Workshop Series 2022!
These four events will help you make progress towards a finished piece of climate fiction. Registration is open now! Join for all four or any combination.
Summer is officially here (for those of us on the northern hemisphere of planet Earth), and it brings with it some of the year’s best chances to experience natural splendor. We pass amongst trees as they put forth their lushest greenery, we hike up mountains as they reach ever upwards to the clear blue sky, and we sit on the beach as the vast ocean sends its waves crashing against yellow sand.
However, the hot weather can also be a reminder of the threats facing this planet. Many communities are already dealing with oppressive and deadly heat, and the situation is due to get worse before it gets better. How does a climate-conscious individual balance enjoyment of warmer weather with concerns over a warmer planet? At Flourish Fiction, we believe it’s not only possible but essential to hold both these ideas at once. We must relish in the joys of this world, while also pushing towards meaningful climate solutions.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our summer workshop series! The goal of these workshops is to help our community to take the leap into writing hopeful climate fiction, possibly for the first time, embracing art as a means of envisioning a brighter future.
Prompt Generation Workshop – July 6, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
Infinite Hope: Imagining a Better World – July 20, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
Open Feedback Workshop – August 3, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
End-of-Summer Showcase – August 24, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
Each event can potentially stand alone, but we encourage you to register for and attend all of them, because they’ll progressively move you towards a finished story at the end of the summer.
Read on for more information about each workshop!
Prompt Generation Workshop – July 6, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
Are you interested in writing climate fiction but struggling with where to begin? Or do you have so many ideas you couldn’t possibly pursue all of them? Writing intriguing prompts rather than fully formed stories can help get the juices flowing, with the additional benefit of inspiring others.
In this workshop, we’ll go over some key elements of an engaging prompt, and we’ll each have an opportunity to generate as many prompts as we can. The prompts will be shared anonymously via Flourish Fiction, potentially leading to a whole host of new stories from the Flourish community and beyond.
Infinite Hope: Imagining a Better World – July 20, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
This workshop will be hosted in collaboration with the Civic Imagination Project, and they describe it as “a future-focused workshop highlighting the power of stories as tools for fostering civic imagination and inspiring real-world change.”
Together, we will engage in collective worldbuilding by brainstorming elements of a future world where humans have managed to prevent the worst impacts of climate change. Then we will each individually come up with outlines for stories that might happen at any point between the present day and that imagined future. At the end, you’ll have the chance to share your story and explore how it might weave together with stories from other participants.
See here for a longer description of this program.
Open Feedback Workshop – August 3, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
This workshop will be a safe space to share work and get feedback from the group. Feel free to bring whatever you’re working on, whether it’s inspired by a previous Flourish workshop or something completely different. Anything is fair game: story ideas, flash fiction, short story excerpts, novel excerpts, and poems. If you can share it in five minutes, then you’re good to go. This will be a valuable chance to get thoughtful feedback from real human beings who are passionate about climate fiction.
End-of-Summer Showcase – August 24, 8 PM ET / 5 PM PT
Community members with work that’s finished or near-finished will have the chance to showcase it in short snippets to an audience of supportive peers and representatives from the climate fiction community. Pieces will be selected from the wider pool of Flourish submissions.
This will be a great chance to preview work that could be published in the Flourish Fiction fall line-up.
Photo credit:
“Nature Sky Summer Sun” via Negative Space