jfprk-blog

[jfprk-blog]

Writing w/ world stuff

For a few weeks now I've had the ambition to blog about the weekly writing workshop I facilitate—well here goes.

This morning I emailed my fellow writers:

hi folx, looking forward to seeing you this evening. i don’t have the prompt together yet, but i know [what] i’m bringing for discussion: science fiction; what would [a] scifi poem would be?; a passage from samuel delany’s essay “to read the dispossessed” and a passage from delany’s story “aye and gommorah.” i encourage you, if you have time, to try to read the story before this evening. it’s ~12pages. i’m bringing paper copies. see you tonight, julian ps - thought i sent this this morning…

Later in the day, earlier this evening, after being reminded by one writer—who emailed me that they wouldn't be able to attend—I replied to the thread with the following two messages detailing tonight's prompt:

1.

for those unable to attend—the prompt, pending adjustments by folx in attendance & convo:

read “aye and gommorah.” or at least the first three pages, as we’ll do in group tonight.  then check out pgs 273-276 of the delany essay i linked (those are rough, could read back a lil earlier/continue on a lil further if you wanted). what you’re looking for is delany’s point that what makes science fiction distinct is the technique of “inmixing.” (lemme know if you wanna chat about that, the essay is pretty difficult at moments) look back at a&g and think about how/where delany is using inmixing. this next part may be fun to try with a friend. delany describes, in those essay pages, inmixing at the level of term, sentence, and plot. with a friend (that may just be you), or a group of friends / writing comrades, come up with at least one, possibly several, but probably not many, inmixed terms, sentences, and plots.  using this/these term(s), sentence(s), plot(s): write a piece of science fictional narrative that may or may not be in prose.

2.

oh yeah! note how in delany's story what emerges isn't only a representation of a familiar social structure made strange (eg queer subcultures & their overlap with sex work & other marginalized forms of labor), but through inmixing opens up entirely new social questions (what unique relations do spacers & frelks have?). how can you use scifi inmixing not only to think about questions you may have about our societies, but also to imagine the questions other societies might deal with too?

As nearly always occurs, when we got together, the plan started to shift. Most substantially, one regular group attendee—whom last week facilitated an excellent session drawing readings and prompts from Ronaldo V. Wilson's book Farther Traveller—showed up after a number of us had already started reading the Delany story. One approach to responding to folk's different reading paces that I first tried a few weeks ago came in useful tonight: ask folks to start writing something once they finish reading. This has the additional benefit of knowing when people could be ready to move on to the next planned (lol, planned; extemporized is more like it most of the time) section. Today, I asked folks to begin making a list when they were done reading not just the first several pages of the story, but also the relevant pages of the essay.

Someone asked, "of anything?"

"Yes," I said.

Before we got to talking about Delany's concept of scifi as tied to a particular manner of "inmixing," we shared our lists in a clock-wise circuit. Then we chatted about inmixing, and I emphasized Delany's intervention, that scifi does not simply literarily innovate so as to estrange a given set of social relations (though interesting on this point is his 1994 commentary on "Aye and Gommorah," included at the end of the linked copy above).

Having gotten a little more comfortable with inmixing as a way of conceiving scifi literary practice, thanks to an excellent interpretation offered by the already referred to late-coming attendee, we then each selected two words from our lists. Then, from our new list of words, we inmixed to form two phrases, two sentences, and two plots, from which we would each draw at least one of each, for our own writing in the last half of our session.

This is the whiteboard of our list, phrases, sentences, and plots.

For easier reading, the word list:

fingernails

scrolling

passport

eyemask

horror

seconds

years

iCloud

underwear

plastic bag

disk player

aerated

The phrases:

aerated underwear

horror passport

The sentences:

I use my scrolling eyemask to stay connected at night.

I sponged the iCloud from my fingernails.

The plots:

How do you make "the disk player years" not about time travel or the 90s?

They served seconds of the plastic bag.

With those elements for prompting, I drafted the below beginning of a story.

The Disk Player Years

Lately, I've had a hard time staying up late enough to feel like I'd gotten my media-fill; I use my scrolling eyemask to stay connected at night. Honestly, it's not quite the same to have programmed visions while dreaming as while awake, but it feels something like what USAmericans must have felt in the early 21st Century when the first wave of attempts to substitute nicotine vaporizers for cigarettes were made.

Yesterday, I got hella full before climbing into my bunk, so no eyemask necessary. Blasted through the Toons Top 40—I was working from dorm, so it was easy. I don't often work from dorm, since my Inc takes the stance that media-filling reduces productivity, but I called in sick for the second time this quarter, & they req that after the 1st sickout all subsequent sickouts log a minimum of 10 hours.

I heard back in those first vape days—the ones I mentioned before—that people estimated the trend would continue toward more and more of the population working from dorm. That was before The Great Management Debates of the mid-21st Century led to a restructuring of global societies' class fractures—between those Incs that thought media-fulfillment promoted productivity and those that thought it undercut it. Since this Debates Incs like mine only allow music to be eaten by those in their employ while at the office. So began The Disk Player Years.

[jfprk-blog]

this is only a

test