Reflecting on Our Summer Workshops
It was a big summer for Flourish Fiction, and our fall line-up will launch next week!
At Flourish Fiction, we’re constantly thinking out how to cultivate an engaged community of writers and readers who dare to imagine a hopeful future. This summer, we held a series of workshops exploring different ways to inspire and support creators of optimistic climate fiction.
We generated a series of prompts, which we shared a few weeks ago, and we gave live peer feedback to writers actively working on climate fiction. We also collaborated with the Civic Imagination Project to host a customized adaptation of their “Imagining a Better World” workshop. During that event, members of the Flourish community collectively imagined a fictional version of Earth in the year 2100 by adding notes to a shared digital whiteboard. Then everyone individually wrote stories taking place in the newly envisioned world. Below is the world the Flourishers imagined. Take a look to see if it spurs any story ideas of your own! You’ll need to zoom in to see some of the many elements of this hopeful and delightful setting. Some are humorous, some are unexpected, and many are desperately needed:
Also this summer, we got a plug from our friends at Grist (who just came out with their second annual Imagine 2200 compilation). This publicity helped lead to our largest-ever batch of submissions, and we’re still working through all of them! If you submitted work to us this summer, you’ll be hearing back about it soon. If you’re eager to read more finished climate fiction, we’ll be publishing our next Flourish in exactly a week. It’s called “Thirteen Ships for the Rising World” (by Danai Christopoulou, Len Klapdor, and A. J. Van Belle). Taking place over the course of a century, this short story follows three generations of women through their roles in preserving food crops, cultivating a de-glaciated Antarctica, and building a kinder, more cooperative future. Stay tuned!
Lastly, we’d like to give a quick shout-out to DearTomorrow, an organization that invites people to write letters to loved ones in the year 2050 and then publishes the results. One of our Flourish organizers attended a recent in-person workshop that they held in Boston. Their mission is very much aligned with Flourish Ficton, helping to encourage climate positivity through storytelling and imagination. Check them out!