Sherri L. Smith - VorTEXT Intensive Retreat

The Octavia Notebooks:  A Workshop on Change and Hope

with Sherri L. Smith

Saturday, November 2nd

9:30 am - 4 pm PM (PT)

Register by 10/21 to ensure your gift package reaches you in time!

Description: Change.  Every great story deals with it – how it happens, and how we– for better or worse– respond to it.  But what makes for powerful fiction can also be a challenge in the real world.  If you are like many writers, the constant change of the past few years, from the pandemic and the social/political landscape, affected your writing.  Maybe it fired you up and changed the direction of a work-in-progress.  Maybe it left you reeling and unable to write.  Maybe a bit of both!  We are still on the rollercoaster ride of our times, raising the question: how do we write in the face of constant change?

In 1993, Octavia Butler grappled with the specter of Change in her speculative fiction masterpiece Parable of the Sower.  Set in 2024, Parable series proved prescient.  In the face of mass unrest and a presidential candidate running under the slogan, “Make America Great Again,”  Butler's protagonist, Lauren Olamina, develops a new belief system around a simple idea:  God is Change.  Through a series of journals, Lauren explores her belief that one can shape Change and thereby shape God.  

In this generative workshop, we will tap into the idea of shaping Change.  By gathering our worries, and tapping into our hopeful imagination, we will use journal keeping, dream tending, and utopian thinking to inform our writing, protect our hope, and plot to create better world.  Using quotes from more Lauren Olamina’s journals, as well as Octavia Butler's own inspirational journaling, this workshop will offer you tools to support writers through the upheaval of the election season, the rising worries of the global landscape, as well as your own character’s journey within your writing. 

Suitable for all levels and genres.