Discovering Dialect

This workshop explores how we might create stories that celebrate and reclaim our own rich culture and heritage by weaving colloquial dialect and cultural references and into our work to create a sense of place, person and story. 

How can our personal vernacular add authenticity and originality to our stories? How does dialect look on the page? How can we engage the reader with linguistic puzzles without overwhelming the work? How do we avoid and subvert class stereotypes when writing dialect and what connections and reconnections can we make when writing about ‘home’?

About the Writers' HQ Writing as Resistance Festival 

Supported by Anglia Ruskin University and the University of Strathclyde

“A word after a word after a word is power” Margaret Atwood

Join Team WHQ, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), and a carefully curated team of incredible authors for a month of panels, workshops, write-alongs and events exploring stories, writing and creativity as radical, political and powerful.

During September, we’re taking a deep dive into the rebellious, subversive nature of creativity and what that means for you, an individual writer sitting in front of a laptop wishing things were better, and for all of us, a community of humans existing together in a world where change often feels impossible.

We’re going to wade deep into the transformative possibilities of fiction and how stories can open portals, sow seeds of change, or lob a well-timed literary Molotov in the jaws of the machine. Fuck yeah!

But! The WHQ Writing as Resistance Festival isn’t just about talking, we’re also doing. With a series of free guided workshops, we are challenging all of you to write a brand new story, but one that’s unlike anything you’ve written before. And then we’ll end he month with a mass celebration during which we’ll send all our stories into the world at once.

The Mass Submission Project

Can stories change the world? Absolutely yes. Throughout the month, via a series of free workshops, we’re challenging you to write a story about climate justice that’s unlike anything you’ve written before. And at the end, we’re all going to submit those stories to the same five mainstream publications. Why are we doing this? Part protest, part art, part ritual outsporing of our collective desires and a demand to be heard. We don’t necessarily expect anything to be published (yet! Cooeee future anthology maybe?!), but we are out to make a noise. There is so much more that stories can do. So we’re going to do it.

Full details of the Writing As Resistance Festival can be found here >>