On the first day of Earth Week, which also coincided with International Cli-Fi Day, Alan Raw, Director of ASP and a creative sustainability practitioner with over 30 years of experience, led an immersive workshop for us, focused on the power of storytelling to shape our collective future.
Rather than focusing on the bleak dystopias that are common nowadays, the session explored how Climate Fiction and the emerging genre of Solarpunk can provide a “psychoactive space” that allows us to rehearse and shape the future we want to inhabit.
Whether you are a seasoned author or have never picked up a pen, this session is designed to give you the permission and tools to start (and keep on) writing. As Alan reminds us, “the future is unfinished, and it is our job to write the one we want to live in”.
Watch the session back below, and have a go yourself at some of the writing exercises.
Video Recording:
In this workshop, we explored:
- Hopeful futures: While many climate stories focus on dark dystopian visions, Alan showcased the Solarpunk subgenre, which focuses on hopeful fiction, asking how we might thrive together in a changed world.
- Four Lenses: Alan took us through an approach he’s created from his novel Salt & Seeds, looking at worldbuilding and story through four lenses: Signs and Signals from Self, Place, the Living World, and the Community.
- Worldbuilding framework: Alan adapted Robert Dilts’ neurological levels into six layers of story-building: Environment, Behavior, Capability, Belief, Identity, and Purpose.
- Practical Writing Drills: We participated in guided sensory writing exercises designed to break through writer’s block and ground stories in lived experience.
Alan introduced us to four essential lenses for observing and narrating the story world:
- Signals from Self: Focuses on sharpening the senses (e.g. Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic) to describe how a world feels to the body.
- Signals from Place: Encourages writing from a particular ground that the writer knows intimately, using lived experience of weather and culture, for example, to add texture.
- Signals from the Living World: Treating non-human life form (such as fungi, tides, or animals) as active characters with agency rather than just background scenery.
- Signals from the Community: Highlighting collective resilience and sociocracy, moving away from just the hero’s journey toward shared, intergenerational solutions.
“Keep writing; the future is unfinished. Write the future you want to live in. Then we can work back from it and see what had to be true to get there, and we can move confidently towards it”
— Alan Raw
About Alan:
Alan Raw is a multi-award-winning Creative Sustainability Practitioner, published author, facilitator, and Director of ASP.
He is the author of the Solarpunk novel Salts & Seeds (2nd Edition coming very soon!) and the non-fiction guide To Sustainability and Beyond.
Resources Mentioned:
- Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
- The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
- The Monk and Robot series by Becky Chambers
- Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, edited by Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Christopher Wieland
- Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach
- Ursual Guin
You can find more novels and resources mentioned in the workshop recording above.
