2026 Speculative Online Workshop Lecture Pass
Workshops
$250.00
Description
Editor's Note
To give better access to the types of craft lectures and industry talks that will be presented during our conference, we offer lecture passes allowing non-enrolled writers to attend faculty talks and guest panels.
Lecture Pass participants will be given links to attend each lecture live. Additionally, all lectures will be recorded and available for up to several months after the conference.
Wednesday, September 2
9 AM PT/ 12 PM ET
Agent Panel with Jordan Hill (New Leaf Literary), Amy Bishop-Wycisk (Trellis Literary) and Aemilia Phillips (DeFiore & Company).
Thursday, September 3
9 AM PT/ 12 PM ET
Agent Panel with Rachel Letofsky (Transatlantic Agency), Alex Land (Mad Woman Literary Agency) and Marin Takikawa (Friedrich Agency).
Saturday, October 3rd
11:30 AM PT / 2:30 PM ET
Worldbuilding in the Creative Dark with Chana Porter
LECTURE
Ready to go on an adventure in your own mind? Chana Porter will guide you on a generative world building journey using her method of The Creative Dark, a potent combination of automatic writing, visualization, and somatic exercises designed to release writer’s block and create surprising new worlds. Come with lots of blank paper, an open mind, and a willingness to explore the unknown.
Saturday, October 3rd
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading with Jami Nakamura Lin, Callum Angus, Rivers Solomon and Jessica Johns
Sunday, October 4th
7 AM PT / 10 AM ET
GENERATIVE WRITING EXERCISE
Sunday, October 4th
8:30 AM PT / 11:30 AM ET
Expanding and Collapsing Reality through Speculative Nonfiction with Jami Nakamura Lin
LECTURE
The genre of speculative nonfiction can provide space to investigate our truths through expansion, fabulism, folklore, hauntedness, and other slanted lenses. In this lecture, we’ll discuss various definitions of the genre, learn craft techniques, and play with the freedom it offers (particularly for those of us from marginalized communities) to challenge society’s consensus reality. Together, we’ll both *mine* the gaps and *mind* the gaps in our personal and communal archives to interrogate and imagine the past, present, and future.
Sunday, October 4th
11 AM PT / 2 PM ET
Spark! Creating with (and through) Genre Tropes with Gerardo Sámano Córdova
LECTURE
A talk that explores and rethinks genre tropes (horror, sci-fi, mystery, fantasy, romance) in order to spark creativity, get us unstuck, and give us tools to structure our narratives. We will engage with samples of novels and short stories to discover powerful vectors to move our stories and see our characters’ path across their worlds more clearly.
Wednesday, October 7th
9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
Emotional honesty—your most powerful (and under-appreciated) writing tool with Alaya Dawn Johnson
LECTURE
Ever wonder how it is that we can love protagonists who are terrible people, or be gripped by narratives in which nothing much is happening, or feel our imaginations captivated by worlds that are nowhere we’d ever want to live? What is it about fiction that allows us to feel so deeply for people we don’t even like in places and times we know so little about? The stories that compel us in profound ways, as disparate as they are in tone and subject matter and worldview, share one essential quality: they are emotionally honest.
“Emotional honesty” is what I call that quality in writing that makes the story, the prose, the characters, the world, and the worldview feel fully congruent. When accurately deployed, this tool is not one for self-reinforcement (i.e. “something is ‘emotionally honest’ when I like it”). Instead, it’s a way for you to access your work’s deepest emotional resonance. Learn to calibrate the gauge that will allow you to judge if a given element of your story is subtly throwing it off-course by being contradictory, hypocritical, poorly-thought-out, or shallow. Many of the higher level writing issues that I encounter with my students amount to problems with emotional honesty in this narrow sense. I will offer strategies for analyzing and for deepening the emotional honesty in our work.
Thursday, October 8th
9 AM PT / 12 PM ET
Wronging, or Revenge: Horror When You Are The Ghost with Jessica Johns
LECTURE
Erasure and defacement concoct ghosts; I don’t want to haunt you, but I will. – Eve Tuck and C. Ree
In “A Glossary of Haunting,” Eve Tuck and C. Ree argue that the hero depicted in traditional Western horror – the hero audiences are encouraged to root for – is evidence of settler society’s desire for exemption from the state’s history of theft, murder, and slavery. The ghosts and monsters, then, are not the roadblocks in the pathway to innocence and freedom for the hero, as they are made out to be, but are victims of colonial violence, haunting the hero as a way to remind them of this violent history. Monsters, in this way, are redefined and re-examined through an anti-colonial lens. Many modern writers use horror as an entrypoint to disrupt settler worlds and heteropatriarchy, and reveal the underlying societal systems that are intent on keeping marginalized peoples as ghosts.
In this workshop, we’ll be using this framework to interrogate contemporary horror texts and our own work: How are we thinking about heroes, monsters, ghosts, and horror more broadly? What is at the heart of horror when colonization is as horrific as humanity gets? What might we see as monstrous in our own cultural contexts? Through close readings, craft interrogation, and group discussion, we will reveal the possibilities and limitations of horror as a social tool, and come away with a deep understanding of how these tools can function in our own work.
Friday, October 9th
8:30 AM PT / 11:30 AM ET
Speculative Mundane with Silvia Park
LECTURE
Some of the most convincing speculative fiction render the extraordinary as ordinary. Close readings of Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God” and Joyce Carol Oates’s “BD 11 1 86” will explore what I call the speculative mundane: the craft of embedding an impossible premise within the rhythms, assumptions, and emotional logic of everyday life. This lecture will examine how writers can blur the boundary between realism and speculation, enveloping the readers in worlds whose mundanity makes the impossible feel real.
Friday, October 9th
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading with Silvia Park, H.D. Hunter and Puloma Ghosh
Saturday, October 10th
8:30 AM PT / 11:30 AM ET
Let’s F*ck Up This Point of View, Shall We? with A.E. Osworth
LECTURE
Point of view is, arguably, the most important decision you’re going to make on any piece of fiction because it touches absolutely everything. That’s why it’s important to expand beyond discussing point of view as simply first, second, and third person. Join A.E. Osworth for an examination of two “weird” points of view (first person plural, first person omniscient) and a game of both chance and skill that will help you f*ck up your own point of view. Bring a page of something you’re currently working on to play with.
Saturday, October 10th
1 PM PT / 4 PM ET
The Geology of Transition: Experimenting Underground in a Time of Change with Callum Angus
LECTURE
We live in a moment when the realities of trans life are denied at the highest levels of government worldwide. In such an environment, art suffers because artists are on the defensive. Queer and trans artists whose work does not directly address bathroom bills and biological determinism are pushed even further to the margins under the belief that in order to defend our rights we must appear more palatable, more legible, and more visible to the powerful mainstream. But this strategy hampers the delicate tendrils of trans experimentation and curiosity in the broader literary culture and beyond. The diverse and strange voices that go “underground” in such circumstances are presumed to do so out of fear, but this talk argues via metaphor and examples that what they find there is more valuable than safety. Underground, things change shape; intense pressures morph rocks into other kinds of rock; tectonic plates melt and fold rock into bewildering layers of history. By writing in a manner that evades, elides, or collides its subjects, trans writers and artists desediment the self and the expectations of conformity demanded by a rights paradigm.
Saturday, October 10th
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading with A.E. Osworth, Wendy C. Ortiz, Alaya Dawn Johnson & Tehlor Mejia
Sunday, October 11th
7 AM PT / 10 AM ET
GENERATIVE WRITING EXERCISE
Sunday, October 11th
8:30 AM PT / 11:30 AM ET
The Tortoise with Teeth: Inventing the New to Capture Emotion with Megan Giddings
LECTURE
In Albert Eckhout’s “Study of Two Tortoises,” he painted a confrontation between two tortoises and was frustrated that in earlier drafts the painting lacked the emotion he wanted to convey. The painting felt right when he changed reality and gave the tortoises portrayed in the painting, teeth. In this craft lecture with potential writing exercises, we’ll discuss how to use image, worldbuilding, and speculative inventions to add emotion and tension to our work.
Sunday, October 11th
1 PM PT / 4 PM ET
Kafkaesque: Speculative Fiction as Social Critique with Ruben Reyes Jr.
LECTURE
Speculative fiction is often consumed and celebrated as a form of escapism, but in the hands of a skilled writer, it can critique or capture the world even more sharply, accurately, and politically than even the most realistic novel. What might be possible when we use genre fiction as a way to confront the world around us?
Franz Kafka offers some answers. In this lecture, we’ll discuss his 1917 story “A Report to an Academy,” narrated by an ape who has learned to speak and act like a human. The story interrogates the pressures of assimilation, initially for Jews like Kafka at the turn of the century. Contemporary writers and critics have found it useful for understanding other historical time periods, including the transatlantic slave trade and present-day migration.
How can a story be so unabashedly surreal, yet so real in its social critique that it endures, transcending geographic borders and time periods? In short: the speculative. Using the story as a jumping point, we’ll discuss formal strategies for crafting speculative fiction that carries social critique. Sometimes, the best way to capture the truth about our world is to distort it in our fiction.
Sunday, October 11th
2:30 PM PT / 5:30 PM ET
Octavia Butler, Positive Obsession with H.D. Hunter
LECTURE
“At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is not about being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” Come with H.D. Hunter as he delves into identifying and cultivating your literary positive obsession. In her famous essay, Octavia Butler speaks about pursuing your creative ideas with relentlessness, as well as establishing a habitual writing practice that bolsters against lack of inspiration, fatigue, and the other woes that plague us. This workshop is primarily for self-reflection, awareness, organization, and brainstorming. Hugh will pose a series of questions and prompts (and provide examples) that help us to think about what themes we’re fond of, what messages recur in our work, and what points we have to get across, no matter what the thing is we’re writing. By honing in on what we want to say and why, we can better channel our efforts and strategize for how to bring our work into the world. This reflection also provides some commercial benefit, as establishing oneself in a genre and with a core audience are marketing tactics that help with building a base of supporters and spreading work far and wide. There’s never been a better time to be positively obsessed. Let’s obsess together.
Monday, October 12th
1 PM PST / 4 PM ET
Magic for the People: Unpacking Power Dynamics in Fantasy Magic Systems with Tehlor Mejia
LECTURE
Magic does more than add whimsy and atmosphere to our fantastical fiction. Our magic systems display the power currents inherent in our worldbuilding. In a culture with so much stratification between the privileged and powerful and the marginalized and disenfranchised, we must reckon with the fact that our narrative choices about who has power, where it comes from, how people use it and who they use it against are vital. We can use magic systems to reflect and reinforce the dominant, oppressive paradigm, or we can subvert it, fueling hope and resistance in a time when it is so desperately needed.
Monday, October 12th
3 PM PT / 6 PM ET
Faculty Reading with Gerardo Sámano Córdova, Chana Porter, Megan Giddings and Ruben Reyes Jr.
Scheduled times are subject to change.
REFUND POLICY:
As you will have access to all recordings, we will not be offering refunds for this lecture pass.
SCHOLARSHIP
Lecture pass scholarships have been awarded.