Over seven weeks, students will explore and practise ways of writing movement and migration, including through memoir, poetry, fiction, journalism, essay, as well as graphic and digital storytelling. Whether you’re writing fiction about moving to a new place, or telling personal, familial or ancestral stories of migration, this workshop is for you.
Email us at hello@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!
Migration can mean many things: leaving home because of war or leaving out of a sense of adventure — and the breadth of everything in between. Whatever it means for you, it’s a defining event in human life, with profound and ongoing reverberations. As a writer who has experienced multiple forms of migration — from fleeing war to emigrating for their studies — Dženana Vucic will be leading this workshop focusing on narratives of relocation and how to tell them with special attention to the social, political and historical context of human movement.
Each class will be split into two one-hour blocks. In the first hour, students will discuss the week’s reading, including work by writers like Safia Elhillo, Saidiya Hartman, Alice Kaplan, Jessica J. Lee, Musa Okwonga and Marjane Satrapi. This will be followed by a writing exercises aimed at finding inspiration and getting creativity flowing, while putting some of the techniques and ideas we’ve just learned into practice.
In the second hour of workshop, students will deep-dive into each other’s writing in an open, constructive and supportive environment. Each participant will have the opportunity to workshop their writing at least once over the seven weeks of class, and students will also receive detailed feedback on their submitted writing from Dženana.
This 7-week intensive course is open to writers of any genre and of any experience level. There are 12 places available. One place is fully funded and reserved for a writer with a refugee background. Please email if you’d like to enquire about this.
Email us at hello@thereaderberlin.com to sign up!
Dženana Vucic (she/they) is a writer and editor living in Berlin. She was born in Bosnia, grew up in Australia and spent time studying in Scotland. Her essays, poetry and reviews have been published in Australian Poetry Journal, Sydney Review of Books, Meanjin, Overland, Cordite, Kill Your Darlings, Gutter, SAND and others. She has been awarded a 2022 Marten Bequest and the 2022 Peter Blazey Fellowship to work on an autotheoretical novel about the Bosnian war, memory, myths of selfhood and un/belonging. Dženana holds a Masters in Creative Writing, Publishing and Editing from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. She is currently a fiction editor at SAND.
