Workshop presented by Juliana Barnet
Mainstream fiction—including movies, plays and TV, as well as books—tends to erase social justice activists. If we do appear, we’re often depicted us as cold-hearted, silly, dogmatic, extremist, neglectful mothers, and so forth. Being stereotyped and marginalized, whether consciously or not, hurts us as people and hinders our work. We need stories portraying us as three-dimensional humans, woven with authentic details—funny, inspiring, surprising, suspenseful—from our real experiences. Since we are the ones who know what it’s like to be us, we need to create our own literature. We have a lot of exciting raw material!
In this two-hour workshop, participants write brief vignettes of several activist experiences—their own or which affected them personally. We then toss these into a hat, participants randomly pick several of the vignettes, and let their imagination weave them together in a new story. This story will be fiction, with invented characters, plot and setting, but will draw upon the real activist experiences that we’ve shared. The immediate results will be brief rough drafts, of course, but hopefully your creativity will be piqued and you’ll keep writing!
Where: 1233 12th St. NW, Washington, DC 20005
Time: 7 to 9 pm EST