Writing the Earth with Our Whole Bodies
Friday March 10 in Seattle
About the Workshop
“Imagination is one of our most powerful tools. What we imagine, we can become.”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass
This workshop will bring together writers imagining other ways of being in the world and relating to one another. We will focus on issues pertaining to extractive capitalism, labor, and our environment in relation to specific places in our realm of experience.
How do the forces of capitalism exert control on our present and our futures?
How do we, as writers, sustain hope, gratitude, and joyful world-making in the face of extractive capitalism?
My newest project is set in the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, and ties the politics of oil back to the US. It cuts a path through Gulf Futurism, which focuses on extractive capitalism in the Persian Gulf countries. I want to push the discourse a step further to reveal the precarity of extractive capitalism and create a platform for the human labor co-opted as fuel for the insatiable development of Gulf nations. I am also interested in looking back to the past and heritage as a way of recuperating our convivial ways of relating to each other and our environment.
I want to connect with other writers whose work dovetails with the speculative or futurist mode. Let’s explore, together, the ways we as writers can confront extractive capitalism and its effects on ourselves, our communities, and our environment.
Writing does not need to be a solitary experience. In this workshop, I share an embodied and collaborative approach to writing that invites us to co-create a shared library of literal and abstract gestures, images, and words. Each of us will come away from this workshop inspired to generate more work and feel a deeper connection to our planet, each other, and ourselves.
This workshop is aimed at attendees of the Big Writing Conference taking place in Seattle, however, all are welcome.
Information
Who is this Workshop for?
This workshop is for anyone who is:
- Writing about the environment
- Feeling stuck and wants new methods to inspire writing practice
- Eager to get out of their heads and into their bodies
- Interested in Gulf Futurism or is engaged with other speculative and futurist paradigms such as Afrofuturism, African Futurism, Sinofuturism, Indo Futurism, Indigenous Futurisms, Queer Futurity etc.
- Other keywords: indigenous knowledge, ecopoetics, climate activism
Why are you doing this workshop?
I am developing a speculative climate fiction novel set in the oil producing Arab countries of the Persian Gulf that chronicles protagonists reshaping society away from extractive capitalism and toward its roots in mutual care and communitarian living.
This novel is a work of socially engaged fiction, and in the spirit of the themes of this novel, I want my writing process to also be socially engaged. I am conducting these workshops to build inspiration and connection with other creative people intent on doing this work, so that we may collaborate and share the bountiful resources of our imagination and creative spirit.
An example of the world of this story can be found in my story “The Runner”, published by Rusted Radishes literary journal and awarded a runner-up prize in the Barjeel Foundation’s Mudun Competition.
I am also editing a forthcoming publication of Mizna focused on Gulf Futurism, and I am keen to draw writers into the orbit of this publication, to begin building a discourse around it.
FAQs
What is the cost of the Workshop?
The Workshop is free, donations accepted to support the space hosting (Pipsqueak)
I am worried about sharing my ideas and stories with strangers. What will you do to cultivate trust and communication?
My goal is to transform writing from a singular act into one rooted in community, expanding whose stories are told and how we tell those stories.
Audre Lorde wrote: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean.” In our brief time together, we will create a common library of ideas, and each of us is free to develop and transform them in our own work.
I am exploring this method to challenge the scarcity economy of publishing by proposing an anti-capitalist and anti-extractive spirit of co-creation. Inspired by Emergent Strategy, this means we move at the speed of trust. My goal is to create an inviting and safer space where you’ll feel comfortable sharing and expressing-the choice is always yours.
This doesn’t sound like a typical writing workshop. Tell me more about the format.
This 90-minute workshop will use devised theater and improv theater games to create an inviting and joyful setting to explore important issues around climate change, resource scarcity, and our relationship to the planet.
Devised theater infuses a social practice into the writing process by bringing community members into intimate dialogue with one another through structured theater games that allow us to explore our responsibility to one another and our environment.
It will also bring a diverse range of people into a single room, cutting across class, age, and other categories to ensure a diverse set of voices are in dialogue and in community with one another. I recognize that there may be social limitations to how cross-gender/cross-class we can get, and I would be thrilled to explore what is feasible in this context.
The result will be a process that has immediacy and relevance, encouraging people to both think critically about ways they are implicated in climate change, and feel hopeful and empowered that they might effect change in the future.
You don’t need any stage experience at all. I’ve done many of these workshops in the past, with high school students, college students, and adults, many with no theater experience!
What will I get out of this workshop?
My hope is that these embodied practices will give you new methods to engage your writing practice. By focusing on themes around the environment, it may inspire your writing with new dialogue, imagery, storylines, metaphors, and more.
Social: The process of devised theater will create a reflective space that enables workshop participants to interrogate climate change, exploring existing and historical models for empathy and mutual care as pathways to effect political change. This depth of engagement will empower existing change-makers and activate people who may be more complacent by fostering connection and hope for the future.
Creative: Participants can produce their own stories, poems, performances, and essays that can be developed and compiled into a public archive online, as well as a publication that documents their experiences and serves as inspiration for further reflection on resources, society, and the environment.
Health & Safety Information:
Masks are required, please avoid fragrances to help make the space safer for people with allergies and sensitivities. Please inform us of any accessibility needs you may have, and we will do our best to accommodate them.
The devised theater exercises may include movement and touch. To maintain a safer space for participants, I will adapt exercises for a range of mobility and bodily capacities. I will prioritize participants’ safety, well-being, and agency by setting norms for seeking permission and consent from one another.
ABOUT
Barrak Alzaid is a writer of memoir, prose, poetry and art criticism whose current work in progress, Fabulous, is a memoir relating his queer coming of age in Kuwait and depicts a story of family fracture and healing.
Excerpts are anthologized in The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds (Penguin SEA) and New Moons, an anthology of Muslim writing edited by Kazim Ali (Redhen Press).
His short story The Runner was awarded a first runner-up prize and published in Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal as part of the Barjeel Art Foundation’s Mudun Short Story Prize.
His poem Fa’et was awarded a first-place prize by Nasiona Magazine in their inaugural micro nonfiction and poetry competition.
He has been awarded fellowships and residencies through Delfina Foundation, Lambda Literary Retreat, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, La Napoule Foundation, and 100 West – Corsicana Artist & Writer Residency.
He is a founding member of the artist collective GCC.
Pipsqueak is a radical social space. It is a sober, all-ages gallery, and event space located on occupied Duwamish land.
Mizna is a critical platform for contemporary literature, film, art, and cultural production centering on the work of Arab and Southwest Asian, and North African artists
Testimonials
“I joined a devised theatre workshop about climate grief and creating ceremonies that reconnect us to the land. Barrak expertly navigated us through interesting and thoughtful discussions, movement, imagining, and reflection. It was hugely impactful for me. Working in the international development sector with climate change affected communities myself, it was really inspiring to approach the topic with a more creative, imaginative and emotional lens.”
“Barrak’s workshop was an illuminating experience, he seamlessly blended performance, writing and community building in the span of a single workshop. As a facilitator, he was incredible at both holding and commanding space and had created an environment where I felt both safe and challenged. I emerged out of the workshop with so much wonder and curiosity about my own relationship with the environment and my own body. I would highly recommend this incredibly unique experience.”
Photographs depict live embodied theater games as well as reflection exercises.
Only two out of the participants had formal theater and stage experience.
