Definitely not! New writers, hesitant writers, reluctant writers, aspiring writers, and discouraged writers are all welcome and encouraged! Almost all of the contributors to Octavia’s Brood, the primary text for this course, had never written fiction, let alone speculative fiction, before that project.

An Unexpected Light has been designed to be modular, meaning that you can do the parts that appeal to you and skip the rest. This means that you can take the course primarily for the narrative therapy practices, or for the curated reading, or for the writing prompts.

The course is no longer tied to a cohort, or to set release dates for content.

Narrative therapy is the foundation of this course, because it offers us a way to explore the stories that we are telling and that we have been told, and to make decisions about the stories that we want to tell going forward. 

This course emerges from my dissatisfaction with how many of our dominant contemporary stories focus on a hopeless and despairing future, or on a future saved by a single hero who saves the world without dismantling (or even challenging) the oppressive systems that have caused these problems.

Narrative therapy offers a way to think about and tell stories that are strong, that are connected to our values and the legacies of action that we want to join, and that challenge the oppressive systems that are inviting apocalyptic problems into our lives.

It can be! But it doesn’t have to be. Course content has been designed to allow you to take your writing and your reflections in whatever direction feels right for you – you can focus on big topics like climate crisis and politics, or you can focus on more personal topics.

This course brings an intersectional feminist lens to the material, and it is explicitly focused on social justice. But you can identify however you would like! There are many reasons that someone might not identify as a feminist, including feminism’s long and ongoing history of complicity with colonialism, racism, ableism, transphobia, and other oppressive systems.

That’s okay! This course has been designed with multiple types of texts (including a graphic novel, some roleplaying games, videos, and podcasts) to make it more accessible to folks who may not feel welcomed by a course that’s full of nothing but written texts.

In addition, you can take this course for the narrative therapy, for the curated content, for the writing, or for any combination. All of the themes have been designed to be modular, so that participants can choose their level of engagement.