Maps for Worlds Still Becoming: Experiments in Genre, Language, and Form

Faith Adiele, Jasmin Darznik, Zeina Hashem Beck, and Eric Olson

The Brower Center - Tamalpais Room

How do we write futures that don’t yet exist? How do we map territories we’re still dreaming and discovering?

In this hands-on, generative workshop, participants will create new work across three experimental approaches—speculative memoir, multilingual poetry, and hybrid forms. Designed as a space for exploration rather than mastery, the workshop invites writers to take creative risks, work across boundaries, and imagine new literary possibilities together.

Through guided exercises and creative constraints, writers will produce fresh pieces that break conventional forms and chart unknown terrain. Led by three writers whose practices are rooted in experimentation, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary thinking, the session offers prompts, models, and frameworks for writing into the unknown.

A brief panel discussion exploring how experimentation in form, language, and genre can open pathways to futures that traditional narratives cannot reach. Faculty will share generative techniques from their own work before participants choose a breakout workshop.

1. Speculative Memoir: Writing Your Alternative Futures

Led by Faith Adiele

Participants will write new memoir pieces that blend memory with speculation—generating parallel narratives, alternative outcomes, or projected futures from lived experience. Through prompts that ask “what if?” alongside “what happened?”, writers will explore how speculation can deepen truth rather than abandon it. Leave with a draft that reimagines a pivotal moment from your life through multiple possible timelines.

2. Tongues of the Future: Multilingual & Diasporic Poetry

Led by Zeina Hashem Beck

Writers will create poems that incorporate multiple languages, experiment with code-switching, or use linguistic hybridity as a generative constraint. Drawing on models from contemporary translingual poets and adapted traditional forms, participants will write pieces that reflect how we actually speak, think, and imagine across cultures. Generate new work that envisions futures where such mixing is not marginal but central.

3. Hybrid Forms for a Digital Age

Led by Eric Olson

Participants will produce experimental pieces using constraints, collage, and unconventional structures that respond to our fragmented, multimedia contemporary moment. Through timed writing exercises and formal experiments influenced by visual art and digital culture, writers will generate work that resists traditional narrative expectations and invents new shapes for new realities.

All participants will leave with new drafts, fresh techniques, and concrete generative methods to continue experimenting in their own practice. This session is especially well-suited for writers drawn to risk-taking, cross-genre work, and expansive notions of voice, form, and belonging.

There will not be table space provided in our Writers' Workshop venues, so in addition to bringing paper and a pen, we recommend bringing a book or other hard surface to write on.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

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Host or Publisher Bay Area Book Festival