Class

Dark Hauntings: Bending Boundaries in Writing for Ages 12 to 14

Welcome back to Summer Youth at Open Book! Join us for a week of writing and all day creativity!

-Session 1: Create Your Own Fantasy or Sci Fi World Using Crafts for Ages 12 to 14 with Kelsy Daly
Build a unique and spectacular fantasy world from the ground up! During our first three sessions, you will design your new world's geography, cultures, laws, magics, technologies, languages, weather, wildlife, and more. Start your world from scratch or continue developing a world you've started outside of class. You'll create actual artifacts--such as maps, letters, recipes, and newspapers--that will help us feel as if we're inhabiting your world. We’ll learn the best details to include to immerse readers in your story. To get inspired and sharpen our skills, we'll take tips and tricks from our own favorite imaginative worlds. To end our class, we'll host an informal “Ambassadors Meeting” for our new cultures to meet.

-Lunch & Enrichment: We'll break for lunch with more activities that will inspire us to express ourselves while having fun! We may explore Gold Medal Park to seek creativity outside the classroom! Please bring a packed lunch.

-Sesson 2: Utopian and Dystopian Worldbuilding for Ages 12 to 14 with Amy Sailer
In this workshop, the students will write a collaborative novella that takes place in a utopian/dystopian society. We will discuss examples of utopian and dystopian stories from diverse writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Becky Chambers, in order to collaborate on a society that has somehow fundamentally shifted from our own. Students will then write their own 3 - 5 page stories that take place in the shared world. On the final day of class, we will read and workshop each other’s stories for craft and continuity, and the teacher will send out the final anthology at the end of the course. Along the way, we will experiment with worldbuilding techniques, including social relationships, setting, and figurative language, and discuss the relationship between utopian and dystopian literature. Taking a page out of the utopian stories we discuss, the class will endeavor to use creative writing to build stronger communities in and out of the classroom.

Aspiring writers, grab your notebooks and pens, and let’s write at the Loft!