Writing the Fantastic | Portal

Join Alysha Herrmann for this practical fantasy writing workshop and enter the worlds of Betwixt River and Stars, an original fantasy project co-created and developed in the Riverland region of South Australia.

Together we’ll explore the core elements that drive a story and discuss contemporary fantasy tropes and expectations. Most importantly, we’ll spend some of the session actively writing together in a shared fantasy world. The session will include real examples from Alysha’s work, lots of opportunity to ask questions, and a whole bunch of weird and wonderful launching off points for your own independent writing projects.

Participants will:

• draft a new piece of fantastical micro-fiction (with the opportunity to submit for publication in a shared zine)
• explore the fantastical worlds of Betwixt River and Stars
• learn about story cores, basic plotting techniques and how to stop getting in our own way as storytellers
• meet and collaborate with other like-minded writers
• leave with at least one new idea!

 
Materials needed: Participants to BYO preferred writing tools (laptop, pen & paper etc)

Alysha Herrmann (she/her) lives, loves, and creates from regional South Australia. She is an award winning independent creative producer, writer, performance-maker, and community organiser, and is the co-founder of Part of Things. Alysha writes about vulnerability, community, hope, grief, forgiveness and belonging. Her work spans creative non-fiction (memoir, essays), experimental digital writing, script writing (screen and theatre), other performance texts, short stories, long-form fiction, and poetry (written and spoken). Betwixt River and Stars is a 20year collaborative fantasy-writing project in the Riverland region of SA, initiated through Alysha's 2021 Regional Arts Australia Fellowship.

Portal is part of Be Part of Things: we are the project. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body and the Regional Arts Fund, which supports the arts in regional and remote Australia.