What can we learn from the past as we attempt to imagine new futures?

June 27, 2024 Spring 2024

In the ruins of the old world, amidst intersecting crises, we ask: What can we learn from the past as we attempt to imagine new futures? How can we write, create, and imagine in community? Why must we expand and layer our imaginations? How might the portals we imagine reverberate within and around us?

Throughout the third iteration of Reading Into the Past / Writing into the Future, an immersive class centering science fiction by Black, Indigenous, Queer, and People of Color worldwide,we examined these questions as we held our collective grief, laughter, and curiosity about the past, present, and future. Guided by Ashley Jane Lewis with support from returning assistant teacher Carey Flack and former student Kenia Hale, this 10 week class served as an experimental writing clinic — sparking creativity through a blend of collaborative writing prompts, guest lectures from visiting scientists, and in-depth discussions that inspired individual and collective speculative writing practices.

Split across two sections which met on Sundays and Wednesdays, RP/WF followed a recipe comprised of: an introspective rumination ran by Ashley that helped students gently enter and exit the space, an interactive archive that empowered students to document their favorite lectures and learnings, several experimental writing exercises and peer reviews to build confidence in our collective writing practice, and a consistent midway rumination held by Carey and Kenia that opened new rabbit holes for reflection and exploration.

Each section had its own unique emotional landscape and energy as we traversed through the topics of new and old worlds, soaked in lessons from non-human kin like bacteria, queered the future, and imagined expansive possibilities on earth and beyond.

To expand beyond the Western canon and use the past as a compass to imagine the future, the class blended writing forms and bended rules while troubling traditional notions of time, human-centricity, and domination which often underpin mainstream science fiction. We explored the ways that we can collectively hold new approaches to science fiction across time, space, and memory while maintaining a rigorous citational practice. In one collaborative writing exercise, we created a kinstellation, visual writing maps, made of interconnected bubbles resembling a constellation, inspired by the work of Jeffrey Yoo Warren and Karyn Recollet. Our kinstellation connected our answer to the prompt: How would you leave hidden ancestral messages for those who came after us? What followed was a series of writings that, without names, read like a collaborative guide towards the future.

In another exercise, we asked students to co-write a two part story in a world-building map. In the art of bending linear time, we instructed each participant to start by writing the end of the story and then complete another participant’s story by writing the beginning of it. This exercise was inspired by a lovely accident in a previous class where Mo Jardinico, Celes, and Bhumika Bhattacharya wrote a collaborative piece from end to beginning, instead of the suggested beginning to end. Shaping the class as we learned from one another inspired an experimental, open-ended nature that strengthened our collective trust, vision, and writing.

Some of the readings we examined included: Octavia Butler, NK Jemison, Nnedi Okorafor, Robin Wall Kimmerer as well as compilations like Palestine +100: Stories from a Century after the Nakba, Past and Future Worlds: Queer and Non-Binary Dystopian Narratives and Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction. We also welcomed guest lectures by diverse practitioners from the sciences like Ayo Okunseinde, Dani Kastelein, and Linda Zhang who shared facts and processes from their practice to help ground and inspire our writing. Together we imagined futures while honoring the diverse thinkers amongst and before us—grounding our work in the legacies of dreamers and doers.

Reading into the Past / Writing into the Future invited participants to contribute to the sci-fi canon, writing themselves and their communities — with deep context, emotion, and intimacy — into the future. Throughout the class, we also created intentional space to honor the world ranging outside of our video conferencing meetings from the concerning state of earth’s climate and the weight of multiple genocides to the question of uncertain futures. Participants embarked on a journey of imagination, writing in a multiplicity of futures, exploring new possibilities, and challenging preconceived beliefs about science fiction and who gets to decide the future.

Many communities—Black, Indigenous, Queer, Arab, and People of Color—already live in post-apocalyptic worlds. We believe that clues to our survival into the next world live in the ways that we hold each other close, tell our stories, read into the past AND write ourselves into the future, together. As Octavia Butler, a Black queer woman science fiction writer and one of our north stars said, “you’ve got to create your own worlds. You’ve got to write yourself in.” That we did.