In Composition class with Professor Crystal Perkins, I had a chance to read the book, “Emergent strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” by Adrienne Maree Brown. From her Spell and Practice section, Visionary Fiction is stood out to me and decided to try out for myself.
The definition of Visionary Fiction is “a way of to practice the future in our minds, alone, and together” and enable us to connect the past and the future. In my opinion, the past gives a great lesson either sweet or bitter, so applying the lessons to the future-self will be helpful to lead the direction. The best practice of Visionary Fiction is writing.
So I would like to introduce about the workshop for practicing Visionary Fiction. The author of the book, Adrienne Maree Brown organized the workshop in May 2020 to cope with COVID-19 pandemic. According to her blog (Link in below), she described this workshop for activate the imagination. She invited people to work on prompts for 30 days to get to writing. It was worth reading through all the texts to see how she navigate to write the story. For example, her Day 1 prompt:Write a conversation between the virus and the crisis, which is quite unique way to animate the situation.
So what I would like to do is using her day1 prompt with a little bit twist. I wrote the conversation between my past self (A) and the future self (B). This is what I gathered so far.
A: Hey, where are you going?
B: I don’t know. Why?
A: Because that’s not where you usually go?
B: Excuse me? How do you know my “usual” pattern?
A: That’s not the point. I want to ask you why you are going there?
B: There? You mean here?
A: Here? I lead you to there.
Very simple, but it’s surprisingly deep. Please let me know on the comments if anyone tried this exercise to see what the past tells you.
＜Reference＞
Book: “Emergent strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds” by Adrienne Maree Brown.
https://www.akpress.org/emergentstrategy.html
Adrienne Maree Brown Blog “Pandowrimo”
Yukina Sato 