if you’re on time , you’re late - a writing workshop by Taylor Le Melle

Three session writing workshop:

Session #1: Sunday, January 19 - 14.30 - 17.30 

Session #2: Sunday, January 26 - 14.30 - 16.30 

Session #3: Sunday, February 2 -  14.30 - 16.30

“if you’re on time, you’re late “ is a three-part workshop series by Taylor Le Melle for writers of speculative fiction, science fantasy, and magical realism. During this series of three workshops we will experiment with timed automatic writing in response to a question or prompt. We will drink tea and discuss what it takes to show up at the desk or wherever you write, and at the end of this workshop you can leave with additional structures to support your creative work. 

The thing is, inspiration is ecstatic, sure, and craft is honed through experience, yes, but in addition to those talents, Octavia E. Butler also had a plan, Ursula Le Guin also had a daily routine. How do we reconcile the rote work of being available to write with our urgent work of dismantling one of England's violent inventions: standardised time? And while writing is not only a cognitive exercise, it does, at a very basic level, entail the firing of electricity from our guts to our brains and then on to other parts of us via the nervous system. First stop after the brain is the heart, by the way. So, the question is, how can we create more heart for our writing by what we feed the gut?

We will be feeding the gut during the workshop because food, or minerals, or our parting gift from the earth, is what carries information to every cell in our bodies, or our DNA, or our gift from our people that came before us in time. Automatic writing is a way of translating that information that the minerals carry.

* Snacks and drinks will be provided during the workshop. Please let us know if you are attending and have any food allergies.

Taylor Le Melle is based in Amsterdam and is a writer. Taylor’s work has been published in the anthology Carrier Bag Fiction by Spectre Books, and as an editor published Orion J. Facey’s cult science fantasy classic The Virosexuals.