[ fiction ]
“Resistance Is Futile”: Speculative Fiction as a Mirror for Our Moment, with Damian Johansson
4 weeks long = $320 total / person
Meets thursdays from 7-9pm eastern time
virtual (Zoom + Google Docs)
Do you have a penchant for writing weird, speculative stories about the future, the past, the spaces between worlds, worlds that never were, and worlds that exist only in your imagination? Do you want to write socially aware speculative fiction that engages with real-world history and politics? Join us for “Resistance is Futile:” Speculative Fiction as a Mirror for Our Moment, the Gilliam Writers Group’s first generative workshop for science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between.
In this 4-week course, we’ll read short stories by many of the masters – writers like Octavia Butler, Margaret Atwood, Robert Heinlein, and William Gibson, and their short stories from across time (1930s-today). We’ll discuss their merit and readability, as well as their successes and failures in representing the issues of not only their times, but ours.
We will also workshop your own speculative stories (either original ones you write for our sessions, or older ones you’ve already written), aiming our editing lasers and plot-bettering spells at your work in the traditional Iowa style. In these group discussions, we will improve, strengthen, and speed up your writing, diving beneath the surface of your words to discover what’s keeping them from becoming as smart, engaging, and boldly imaginary as it can be.
We’ll also use creative prompts and exercises to hone your tools of literary craft, whether you’ve only recently drawn them from stones, or if they’ve always been at your side.
Fantasy and sci-fi lovers, unite! Sign up for “Resistance is Futile” today. Find your community of wonderfully odd writers in our Zoom-powered, 2-hour roundtable sessions.
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Damian Johansson is from the apex of the United States, Minneapolis, Minnesota. He earned his MFA from the University of Minnesota, specializing in Creative Nonfiction. Before pursuing graduate work, he tutored Big 10 athletes, students from more than 40 countries and home languages, a high-profile felon writing her memoirs, high school students taking their first shaky steps into the stanzas of poetry, retirees parsing sentences in their life stories - and so many more.
He publishes in all three main genres of creative writing - Fiction, Poetry, and Creative Nonfiction. Straying outside the norm, he writes Science Fiction - what Robert Heinlein called “Spec Fic.,” Young Adult Fiction, and writing in translation - using the Swedish he learned during his undergraduate to explore intersections in language.
Damian was the first to teach a Science Fiction workshop in the 140-year history of the University of Minnesota. He has worked on staff at Ivory Tower at the University of Minnesota, and 9th Letter, at the University of Illinois. His work has been published in Anamesa at NYU, Juxtaprose, Rootstalk (Grinnell College), The McNeese Review, anthologized in plain china, and in other places large and small. His teaching at the University of Minnesota was featured on NBC Nightly News with Kevin Tibbles.
When he’s not writing, Damian reads (sometimes too much), tries to take arresting and artistic photographs, and examines liminal spaces - between city and country, between nostalgia and pop culture.
