Introduction to Creative Futurism: Using Speculative Fiction Techniques to Express and Extend Research

In this one-day workshop run by award-winning speculative fiction writers, you will use storytelling techniques to imagine possibilities for your research over multiple timeframes and from several perspectives. No prior creative writing expertise is necessary. These easy-to-pick-up exercises will help you come to a deeper understanding of the uses and contexts of your research as well as imagining potential future threads and stress-testing your ideas. You will come away with a selection of tools and techniques for expanding an idea, a draft of a proto-story, potential ‘hooks’ to tell others about your research, and a list of questions that make you think about your research in new ways.

Facilitators

Joanne Anderton

Joanne Anderton is an award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy and horror, children’s books and creative nonfiction. Her most recent collections of speculative fiction short stories are Inanimates: Tales of Everyday Fear and The Art of Broken Things. She's currently undertaking a creative writing PhD at the University of Queensland for which she’s writing a ‘speculative fiction memoir’, a collection of short stories and essays which interrogates the line between fact and fiction, real and imagined. You can find her at joanneanderton.com.

Dr Kathleen Jennings

Dr Kathleen Jennings is an award-winning writer and illustrator of Australian Gothic and fantasy fiction. Her novella Flyaway (2020) won a British Fantasy Award (the Sydney J Bounds Award) and was shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award and the Courier-Mail People's Choice Book of the Year Award, among others, and her debut short story collection Kindling was published in 2024. She holds an MPhil and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Queensland (focussing on Australian Gothic literature and methods of creative observation respectively). You can find her at tanaudel.wordpress.com.