Summer sf work/shop
In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the totalitarian One State has invented a surgery that can remove a person’s imagination. Just cut it right out, so that it never bothers them again. For it is the imagination—the ability to imagine a different world, to envision that things could be other than they are—that represents the greatest threat to the totalitarian state. It brings to mind the quote from Martín Espada that I’ve had tattooed at the top of the work/shop page for some time now:
No change for the good ever happens without being imagined first, even if, at the moment we imagine this great change, it seems absolutely impossible. History teaches us, too, that we are the agents of this great change. It doesn’t come from the White House; it comes from our house.
The White House part hits harder every day. No vision of a future that is life-giving will ever come from that demolished house! It is our own homes, our own neighborhoods and walkways and watering holes, our own workplaces—whether that be where we do our waged work or our art work or our care work—where we can exercise our imagination toward different, and brighter, futures.
Espada was writing in 1996, but he was also writing many years before that and many years since; he was, and is, writing for us. Writing breaches the space-time continuum, reaches forward and back and across; writing is a magic of time-travel, of invention and creation, of abolition and reconstruction, of change. What Espada’s assertion here always reminds me of is how critical it is to maintain a vast horizon of imagination, to practice imagining different ways of being and living and making change with each other, to counter the narratives of inevitability and austerity that try to worm their way into our hearts and minds, foreclosing those always-possible futures. Who wants you to believe that only one future is possible, the one they declare? The fascists and tyrants, the wannabe dictators, all the emperors prancing around with no clothes.
You know better, but it can be hard to keep that knowing top of mind, to hold that tiny flame in your hands while the wind batters at you and the rain pours down and the dawn seems so far away. That’s what this work/shop is for: to give you space to bring this knowing into the day, to fortify it against the investor brain worms and chickenhawk executives, the credulous tech media and the institutional scaremongering, the incessant banging of the drums of war. Your imagination needs a protected cove to recuperate and gather strength, to practice and build muscle, to learn the ways to defend itself when it ventures back out to sea, among the storms and thrashing waves.
Here is what we will do: we will write, letting that imagination loose, giving it room to wander and explore and open up as we so rarely do in our day-to-day. We will notice that writing, for ourselves and our comrades, notice what it is bringing up, what it surfaces and exposes, what fears, desires, longings, and more have been lurking out of sight. We will think together about what these noticings tell us, and how we can work with them, how we can wrap our hands around them and shape them and make things of them. We will draw from many liberatory practices and philosophies—abolitionist thinking and feminist economies, utopian demands and anti-work imaginaries, transformative justice, narrative strategies, and of course, speculative fiction modes and movements. You will learn strategies for expanding your attention, for relinquishing habits that keep your imagination bound and small, for bringing all those wanted and imagined futures closer to hand.
You can read all about the work/shop here. The next cohort will take place Wednesdays, 12pm-1:15pm EDT (UTC-4) from May 27–July 1, 2026. Applications are open now. The application is short, and is designed to provide just enough information for me to design a balanced cohort. As always, you must agree to abide by the code of conduct to be considered. Applications are due before noon EDT (UTC-4) on Wednesday, April 22. Everyone who applies will hear from me the following week.
I will leave you now with one final thought: the tyrants and despots, the bare-assed emperors, they fear one thing from you above all else—your own vision and clear sight, your ability to see them for what they are, to see the future for the open, undiscovered potential it always is. You keep your chin up not for pride but because it lets you see further afield, beyond their boots and brags, to the clear, open sky.