Department of English

This creative writing workshop will explore contemporary traditions within the mode of the speculative and the fantastic—including Western science fiction, magical realism, Afrofuturism, fantasy, horror, slipstream, dystopia, visionary fiction—and investigate the political and cultural landscapes that gave rise to each. We will discuss concepts such as imagination, entertainment, escapism, world-building, cognitive estrangement, and the grotesque BOTH as vital forces that inform and shape our relationship to the world, AND as tactics to be cultivated through practice and deployed by skilled craftspeople. We begin from the position that content is inseparable from aesthetic, that language is as important to the vitality of speculative fiction as to any other mode of writing, and furthermore that all language is political and thus encodes something urgent about the moment from which it emerges. We will particularly examine how genre, low culture, and nonrealism have been used as strategies for subversion and resistance. We will test the hypothesis that all fiction is speculative by writing and workshopping our own original work.