We are delighted to announce that the first Writer-in-Residence for our online community is Sarah McPherson. Welcome to the team Sarah!
Sarah is a writer based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK. Her work reflects her lifelong passion for speculative fiction and mythology/fairy tales, as well as her love of history and a desire to explore how people relate to nature, the landscape, and each other. Her writing has been widely published, nominated for Best Small Fictions 2022, longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50, and selected for Best Microfictions 2021.
From September 2023 to February 2024, Sarah will be teaching workshops, running feedback sessions and writing articles for our community as part of her role. We’re really looking forward to working with her!
The workshops she’s teaching are:
Speculative Flash: Fantasy (November)
The first of two workshops on writing speculative flash fiction, exploring how to convey big ideas in a small space and include enough worldbuilding for readers to understand the story without overwhelming your word count. You’ll get tips on how to effectively incorporate elements of the fantastic into your flash fiction, read some example stories from writers who do this well, and try writing exercises on both secondary-world and modern/urban fantasy.
Speculative Flash: Science Fiction (January)
The second of two workshops on writing speculative flash fiction, exploring how to convey big ideas in a small space and include enough worldbuilding for readers to understand the story without overwhelming your word count. You will try drafting flash fiction in both near and far future settings, read some excellent examples of tiny science fiction stories, and play with some sci-fi tropes such as time travel, robots/artificial intelligence, and space travel.
Each of the two workshops will stand alone, but will complement each other – so you can choose fantasy or science fiction, or both!
And the craft articles are:
- Writing retellings of fairy tales, myths and other old stories
- Writing lessons from roleplaying: collaborative, playful storytelling
- Writing relationships with / journeys through the landscape
The Community Writer-in-Residence role is an ongoing programme starting every 6 months and applications are now open for the 1st March 2024 start date. Get all the info here.