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Let's take the process of writing beyond tapping our pencils and keyboards. There are some well known strategies to overcome the resistance that seizes our creativity, including brainstorming, outlining, writing by hand, copying a passage from another author's work, and more. I draw on my own experience feeling stuck, and share some of the techniques I developed that go beyond those common methods. I will encourage you to embrace your own relationship to writing in new and delightful ways.

This workshop is for writers of all experience levels who want new methods to engage with, and discover their work.

What to prepare for the workshop:

A helpful (but not required!) bit of reading is Matthew Salessas' Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping.

Please bring colored pens, stickies, highlighters, A3 paper, notecards and whatever else can help you annotate a work. You'll also need hard copy printouts of writing at various stages of the process-from brainstorms to revisions (from the same or different projects).

Barrak Alzaid is a writer and an artist with extensive experience in curating contemporary art and performance.  His current project, Fabulous, is a memoir that relates his queer coming of age of in Kuwait amidst a family’s fracture and reconciliation. His poem Fa’et was awarded a first place prize by Nasiona Magazine in their inaugural micro nonfiction and poetry competition. His work has been published online and in several anthologies, including The Ordinary Chaos of Being Human: Tales from Many Muslim Worlds (Penguin SEA), Emerge: 2018 Lambda Fellows Anthology and in New Moons, an anthology of Muslim writing edited by Kazim Ali (Redhen Press). He is a founding member of the artist collective GCC whose work examines the Arab Gulf region’s transformations and shifting systems of power. They have exhibited in solo and group exhibitions at MoMA Ps1, The Whitney Biennial, Sultan Gallery Kuwait, Berlin Bieniale IX, Sharjah Art Foundation, among others.