Young Adult Writers Program (YAWP): Dystopia/Utopia: How We Dream Our Future

What do you FEAR the world will look like in the future? What do you HOPE the world will look like in the future? These are questions we ask as writers, but also questions asked by activists, politicians, scientists, students, and all people involved in creating the world of tomorrow. In this class, we’ll learn a bit about the history of both dystopia and utopia, two intertwined genres that imagine the future either as something to warn against or something to strive for. We’ll delve into the classic dystopias that warned about the future, the critical dystopias of the 80s and 90s that offered a bit of hope, and the unabashedly hopeful contemporary genres in which writers, particularly of marginalized identities, are reclaiming the concept of utopia— not to write a “perfect” world, as the genre originally implied, but to imagine a more equitable future (Solarpunk, Afrofuturism, Indigenous futurism, Visionary Fiction, and others). Where do hope and fear lead us? What can each teach us about what it means to be human? This class will involve collaborative world-building exercises in which we invent both dystopias and “utopias” together, as well as discussion and in-class writing time. For writers age 13 – 18 ONLY.