Brighter Futures 2025
Justice, Environments, and Storytelling
A free, expenses-paid residential retreat outside Barcelona that explores and promotes the best speculative environmental fiction for children and young adults
We propose a writing workshop oriented around three dimensions of speculative environmental fiction that challenge traditional constraints in environmental children’s and young adults’ fiction. Through a series of collaborative activities, participants will explore these dimensions and clarify their personal approach. They will have time to work on current writing or illustrating projects, to teach and learn, and to put workshop ideas into practice.
The three dimensions are:
1. Environmental Justice
Dreams of environmental restoration are vital, but many carry within them oppressive thinking. Conservation, for example, can exclude communities from environments they have long nurtured. Environmental Justice allows for alternative, pluriversal visions of the future that can resonate with a more diverse audience in environmental storytelling.
2. Dismantling Harmful Tropes
Interwoven in environmental racism and prejudice are harmful tropes that enmesh different participants in old and worn-out stories. Authors, or their imagined audiences, carry with them various powerful gazes (white, male, heterosexual, etc.) that can vitiate stories. New and radical ways of storytelling can break the chain along which these harmful tropes propagate.
3. Beautiful Storytelling
Writing about environmental justice in wholesome ways risks being boring, or worse, earnest. Righteous stories still need to be brilliant books that are not just exciting, but enthralling; not just intriguing but compelling; more hilarious than funny; not just adventurous but – you get the picture.
This writing workshop will explore these issues through a mixture of formal exposition, shared activities, writing critique, and personal exploration. We will spend time writing, reading, thinking, and talking with preparatory work shared beforehand, and developed while on site. Crucially, participants will not be either deliverers or recipients. Everyone will be both.
To this end, we invite expressions of interest from potential participants who can contribute as both sharers and receivers. They will be able to contribute to the design and delivery of workshop activities, by virtue of their experience or formal expertise, that contribute to one (or more) of these three elements. They must also be keen to learn about one or more of the others. Thus, we are interested in hearing from published authors who seek to challenge the tropes in environmental fiction or learn more about environmental discriminations; environmental and social scientists who are published or aspiring authors; literary experts and editors who are published or aspiring writers and/or keen to expand their purview in environmental affairs and so on. Each participant will contribute (singly or in groups) to activities in the workshop and to participate in learning in the other elements.
The workshop will take place in a convivial and beautiful residential retreat outside Barcelona. You can see it here. All reasonable costs will be met by the organizers that arise from travel (international and local) and include food, accommodation, and visa expenses. We anticipate 20-30 people will be invited. The workshop will take place from 24-27 April 2025. It will be conducted in English.
FAQs
1. You say ‘We propose’ above. Who’s the ‘we’?
We are a collective of authors, researchers, and storytellers who love writing stories, and value just environments and inclusive environmentalisms. We think young people’s imaginaries should be filled with such stories. Google / write to us to find out more about who we are.
2. Why do you think this is sort of workshop is needed?
We generally need more inspirational and fun writing workshops, and we believe that connecting people across environmental fiction and scientific research communities will create new spaces for storytelling. We have yet to meet a writer or researcher who does not urgently need to spend a weekend in a beautiful place near Barcelona.
3. But why the environmental justice theme?
Just environments matter. Climate change, biodiversity loss, pollution and degradation threaten us all and disproportionately affect marginalized communities. Yet these environmental imperatives can result in totalitarian solutions and dogmatic imaginaries. At the same time environmental crises worry children and young people. They want to engage and learn about their world. They want environmental stories; they deserve brilliant ones.
4. And why the focus on marginalized voices?
Many authors and publishers work from positions of privilege, often reinforcing marginalizing tropes. Others, who tell stories that resonate with environmental justice, find their stories at the margins. Tackling these structural inequalities requires thought and care. For example, themes like poaching are often glorified in wonderful stories when the poachers are white (think of My Side of the Mountain, Danny the Champion of the World, or even Robin Hood), while the injustices these poachers fought, and the freedoms they enjoyed, still persist in marginalized communities around the world but those actions are criminalized.
5. Do we just turn up and take part?
No. There will be some pre-design of the activities you are contributing and some prep for the sessions you are learning in. Some writers will want to share draft work for constructive comment beforehand, and there may be some preparatory reading. We hope that people will have at least 3 months to do all this preparation.
6. Free everything means free wine as well, right?
Wrong. That would be too good to be true. But Catalans love wine and books so much that writers are virtually given bottles of almost free amazing wine when they arrive. There should be a good selection for you to choose from in local shops.
7. What kind of writing activities will there be?
We will set aside time each day for individual writing projects. There will also be different collective exercises, discussions, and activities that participants will suggest. Opportunities for one-on-one critiques and/or group critiques are also possible.
8. Can we attend with our teens and how can they take part?
We will explore how to entertain family members as needs arise. In principle, this could be possible.
9. Will there be any engagements with local environmental issues?
We hope so. There is a lot going on in Cataluña with which we can engage. We will gauge demand when we know who is coming.
10. What will the eating/sleeping accommodations be like?
Participants will cook for each other in teams and smallish groups. We will do our best to accommodate families and single occupancy rooms, but this is not a guarantee and will depend on the venue. Please be ready to share a room but let us know if that will be difficult.
11. Why hold this in late April?
23rd April is World Book Day and an occasion of great celebration in Catalunya as it is also the festival of St Jordi. We thought people might want to arrive on Tuesday 22nd, enjoy themselves in Barcelona on 23rd, and then we will all head off to our venue on 24th, returning on Sunday 27th.
12. How will you cope with the demand for this sort of workshop?
We think it will be popular. We will be prioritising applicants who are starting out in their writing and career journeys. Applicants who can provide a more youthful perspective are particularly welcome.
The Organisers
Kartik Shanker; Nick Record; Naomi Milner; K.L. Going; Nahida Esmail; Dan Brockington
Dan Brockington 