Modern Magical Realism with Tabitha Bird
Take your uniqueness and personal truths to create powerful writing that reframes your ordinary world through the use of magical realism.
Modern magical realism is not only about creating magic in your stories but also about breaking the rules of ordinary by using your unique sense of wonder and giving your work an emotional punch. In this workshop, we’ll explore the power of our own stories to create deeply meaningful fiction that inspires others to use their imagination and heal what hurts us.
Tabitha Bird will walk participants through a series of out-of-the-box exercises designed to ignite your imagination, disrupt your ordinary and move past any feelings of being ‘stuck’ in your writing.
We’ll explore how to unearth the emotional truth in your own lived experiences to add emotional resonance to your magical world. Experiment with how magic in fiction creates a safe space to explore important and emotionally-charged topics. We’ll also examine the lightness, courage and ultimately uplifting ways that magic balances the darkness with the light in such stories. Break all the rules of ordinary thinking and learn how to capture the human condition and reframe our world and important social issues through the use of magical elements in fiction.
Learning Outcomes
What is modern magical realism?
Break the rules of the ordinary world while still creating a consistent and believable magical fiction
Learn how to mix your own heritage, diversity and lived stories with magical elements and why that makes for such powerful storytelling.
Add out-of-the-box writing exercises to your writer’s toolbox to Ignite your imagination find the seed of your own emotional truth
Explore 3 Act Story structure as it relates to magical realism and how that differs to other fictional writing.
Balance the light and dark (heavier and lighter themes) in fiction using magical elements and create safe and accessible space for readers to engage with your themes.
Learn how to use magic to create ultimately hopeful literature that will inspire your readers.
Format
This is a hybrid workshop with a focus on craft; it will be held in-person at the Kurilpa Room at Common Ground in South Brisbane and live streamed simultaneously to an online audience. It is a level 1 course for writers of all levels.
About Tabitha:
Tabitha Bird is the author of magical realism novels with heart. Her debut, A Lifetime of Impossible Days, won the Queensland Literary Award- People’s Choice in 2020. In 2021, she won a Queensland Writers Fellowship for the production of her third novel and her second novel, The Emporium of Imagination was published with Penguin Random House.