Write Wild: A Generative Retreat
TAKE A WHOLE DAY OFF TO EXPLORE, EXPERIMENT, AND (RE)GENERATE
WRITE WILD is a day-long creativity retreat in Houston, TX, focused on generating new ideas and work. In four distinct workshop sessions, each led by a different facilitator, you’ll experiment outside your usual form, genre, and style, allowing you to peek around the corner of your usual creative process to discover what lies beyond. Let go of self-censorship, be inspired by creative forces outside yourself, and see how your work changes when you look at it from new and experimental angles.
Write Wild is open to all writers, visual artists, and other creative spirits who want to explore their creativity through the written word, so bring your laptop, notebook, sketchbook, camera, or any other tools that inspire you!
Sharing your work is always optional. Facilitation will be in English, but you should feel free to write in any language.
LUNCH BREAK — 12:00-1:00 PM
We’ll have a fridge on premises, so feel free to bring a packed lunch—we’ll have water and other refreshments available. There are also several convenient food options a few minutes’ drive away.
Guest Facilitator: JULIA RIOS
We’re very excited that this time, our guest facilitator is award-winning editor and writer Julia Rios, visiting from far-away Boston! Julia is one of the original founders of FuenteCo, and this will be the first time all four co-founders are leading Write Wild together since the very first one in July of 2017. Don’t miss it!
JULIA RIOS is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Currently a Hugo Finalist as the Fiction Editor for Fireside Magazine, Julia won the Hugo award in 2017 and is a Finalist again in 2018 as Poetry and Reprint editor for Uncanny Magazine, as well as being a previous Hugo Finalist as a Senior Fiction Editor for Strange Horizons. Julia is a co-host of The Skiffy and Fanty Show, a general SF discussion podcast, and has narrated stories for Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders.
Sessions
Change Your (Hi)stories: Exploring Transformation and Evolution
PATRICIA CORAL
As the world changes around you, does your work change with it? How does your personal change and evolution affect your creative expression? In this session we'll engage with transformations, whether important or mundane, deliberate or unplanned, external or internal, and think about how the passing of time, forces outside our control, and new surroundings and circumstances influence not only our lived experience but also our creative process and work.
Digging for Gold: Playful Inroads to Memory
TAYYBA MAYA KANWAL
Following a morning of self-reflection, we'll pick up the pace with this prompt-driven session that will have you generating story seeds utilizing playful props and experimental exercises. Delve into your personal histories and past relationships and draw on your memories to discover new starting points and potential themes for use in future personal essays, poetry, and even fiction.
One Can Only Laugh: Humor as a Tool of Creative Rediscovery
JULIA RIOS
Someday, we'll laugh about this— isn't that something we say to get through unpleasant, embarrassing, even painful experiences? Humor isn't just for humor writers: we'll use this session to explore how turning the lens of humor on our work, whether personal or fictional, can lead to important and unexpected story or character developments, and provide us with new perspectives on memories and stories we thought we knew inside-out.
Layer upon Layer: Experimental Forms as a Catalyst for Personal Storytelling
LAYLA AL-BEDAWI
Do you ever feel so close to a draft that viewing it with a critical eye becomes a challenge? Whether in poetry, fiction, or personal nonfiction, the emotional heft of our work can weigh us down, even block us from finishing it, let alone submitting. In this session, we'll take a creative approach to drafting "heavy" work: we'll explore how giving stories an inventive, experimental form can have a considerable impact on their content, our editing process, and our comfort level for sharing it with the world.
Cost: $95
Participants: 12
Facilitators
