Novelist Jaspreet Singh will conduct a creative writing workshop, at the intersection of scientific and humanities disciplines, with a special focus on “human,” “nature,” objects, and changing relationships and landscapes. How stories can help us grasp and better imagine the findings of scientists, and address the insight that: ‘Collectively human beings have become a non-human geological force.’
This workshop assumes that the stories we tell and live are also geological agents, and it will encourage the participants to locate new forms of stories for living in the Anthropocene epoch. How to make our stories less anthropocentric? How to locate moments and situations that allow a better integration of multiple scales (the scale of our everyday life and the local; the scale of human history and the global; the scale of Earth’s history and the planetary)? How to write between text and image and other media? How to create new metaphors? How does one breathe life into characters in a world gone logarithmically ambiguous and metastable? How to engage with words and concepts like “hope” in a story? This workshop is for beginners, and will include the growing vocabularies of climate emergency. University students from all disciplines are welcome. Students with intermediate or advanced creative writing experience are also welcome.

Duration: six sessions, June 11-12, June 18--19, June 25–26, 16 h to 20 h or 22 h respectively

Conducted: online

Number of hours: 28

Activities include:

[1] Presentations/conversations on the craft of fiction/creative non-fiction.
[2] Suggested Readings. (Books, stories and essays)
[3] Writing assignments.
[4] One-on-one manuscript consultations.
[5] Group critiquing and conversations about writing.
[6] Online public readings of work created during the workshop.
[7] Additional short-story workshop (for students with intermediate and advanced writing skills)


Jaspreet Singh is an award-winning Indian-Canadian writer, and a former research scientist. His books include two novels, Chef (Bloomsbury, 2010) and Helium (Bloomsbury, 2014); a story collection, 17 Tomatoes (Vehicule Press, 2004); and a collection of poems, November (Bayeux Arts, 2017). His essays have appeared in Granta, Brick: a literary journal, The Globe and Mail, and the New York Times. His work has been translated into French, Italian, Arabic, Spanish and Punjabi. His memoir My Mother, My Translator will be published in 2021, and his sixth book, Nature, a collection of poems, is slated for publication in 2022.
http://www.jaspreetsinghauthor.com/