Please join us for ‘Writing Environmental Fables in Kent’, a creative writing workshop, in which we invite you to write a fable which addresses environmental issues close to your heart.
Through fables – short narratives which give voice to nonhumans and convey moral lessons – we will explore our relationships with the environment, natural forces and other species, and meet like-minded individuals to share concerns.We are delighted to have Shreyasi Sharma, an Indian writer passionate about environmental issues, as our facilitator.
Please bring ideas for environmental issues you would like to explore and write about. This can be anything – extreme weather, global warming, pollution, deforestation, urbanisation, species extinction, multispecies relations, food security, energy concerns, etc.
We are particularly interested in making fables out of issues here in Kent, in order to explore global environmental crisis as that which impacts each one of us personally. We also encourage you to bring some objects which speak to your topics and interests – for example: leaves, shells, maps, photos, your own drawings, field notes, sound recordings. We intend to take innovative and experimental approaches, and these objects will be part of our fable writing session.
We welcome participants from different backgrounds and disciplines bringing their knowledge and methodologies to the workshop. We will spend most of our time writing a fable. Tea/Coffee will be provided.
Shreyasi Sharma is a writer and educator from India. She was the 2023 Charles Wallace India Trust Creative Writing Fellow at University of Kent. She writes poems and essays on transforming spaces. Her words have appeared in many journals, and in 2022 Red River Press published her poems and narrative non-fiction about the city in an anthology titled Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts. Her recent essay, ‘Crows in this part of New Delhi’ was published in Rumpus, 2024. She is currently working on a nonhuman novella.
This workshop is part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis’, led by Dr Kaori Nagai (School of Classics, English and History, University of Kent), in collaboration with Kent’s Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment. If you have any queries, please contact Kaori at K.Nagai@kent.ac.uk
