The (Un)settled Writing Workshops are a series of online monthly writing sessions where friends and members of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies (IPCS), across all levels of writing experience, come together to experiment with modes of writing that do not perpetuate reinvestments in settler ontologies or depend on apocalyptic fantasies.
The workshops will cover four broad themes: home, geoengineering, multirealism, and Indigenous futurism. Together, they will investigate:
- What does home mean in a climate changed world?
- What does it mean to belong after apocalypse?
- What is it we refer to when we speak of realism?
- What modes/styles of writing can speak back or resist settler ontologies?
- What can we learn from those who have resisted through writing before us?
The workshops will explore these questions through a series of writing exercises that experiment with literary strategies such as parody, counterfactual writing and magical realism to critically interrogate settler colonial ontologies. Exercises will also ask participants to walk their places and consider how they have been made, inform their understanding of belonging. In this manner, these workshops follow a research methodology similar to that outlined Emily Potter and Brigid Magner in their work on the Mallee (2019) and practised by the J.M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice’s Oratunga Winter School.
To join please send a brief expression of interest to Jack Kirne and Carlos Morreo by Friday 22 October.
