Page, Jocelyn and Tsang, Riley. 2025. 'Translating Personal Realities into Collective Action through Creative Writing'. In: Writing in the Real World: 7th European Association of Creative Writing Programmes (EACWP) Pedagogical Conference. Paris, France 15 - 17 May 2025. [Conference or Workshop Item]

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Abstract or Description

What place does creative practice hold within our collective climate crisis? Might the act and process of creativity unlock important possibilities on our journey toward justice? Can creative writing be employed as a tool to realise and translate personal experiences into communal realities within the real world? As the climate emergency becomes increasingly tangible and present in our broader lived experience, public discourse and media narratives increase the felt need for immediate global action. However, the common narratives’ stress on institutionalized global solutions can discourage individuals’ and communities from fulfilling their indispensible role of advocacy and futuring within the overarching struggle for climate justice.

Led by Riley Tsang (Greenpeace) and Jocelyn Page (Goldsmiths), this workshop will centre the dual considerations of self and community within the challenging taxonomy of real-world experiences in 2025. Informed by Participation Action Research (PAR), this 90-minute session will encourage participants to identify, discuss and interrogate their past encounters and attitudes toward climate change through a focus on themes of home and hope. Attendees will be led through a three-part iterative exercise designed to locate and strengthen their imaginative muscles while drafting text that involves and complexifies inherent perspectives of subjectivity and objectivity vis a vis climate concerns. After pair and plenary sharing of real-world considerations and emotions regarding climate change, the group will collectively name and list effects of this phenomenon in the real world. Workshop facilitators will then briefly introduce the Just Poetry project, an activist / literary intervention designed by the Climate Justice and Liability team at Greenpeace that recently shared verse from poets around the world in support of the hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. With this awareness of current creative writing strategies, workshop writers will then be asked to draft original text employing first-person narratology, adopting a persona, in an act of creative empathy, within the context of a future, fit-for-purpose home. In small groups, participants will map their written spaces onto a collaborative blueprint, further gesturing toward cooperation, compromise and co-creation. Participants will ultimately craft a short piece of writing – a drama, dramatic monologue or epistolary work – to articulate this shared fictional reality, framed by a radical sense of hope, featuring desire-based tools and world-building, which will be read to their small-group members. A workshop-wide reflection on process and product, with an eye toward onward development in the real world, will conclude the exercise.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Other)
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	English and Comparative Literature
Dates:	Date Event 16 May 2025 Completed
Event Location:	Paris, France
Date range:	15 - 17 May 2025
Item ID:	39212
Date Deposited:	22 Jul 2025 14:06
Last Modified:	22 Jul 2025 14:06
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/39212

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