Responders of Colour: Guest Creative Writing Workshop with Nasim Rebecca Asl (Zoom)

Responders of Colour: Guest Creative Writing Workshop with Nasim Rebecca Asl, Sunday 27th February, 10.30 – 12.00, Zoom.

We’re delighted to announce as part of our Responders of Colour project, we will be holding two creative writing workshops with acclaimed poet Nasim Rebecca Asl, who will be delivering workshops in response to both her own archive of annuals and Glasgow Women’s Library’s.

Launched last year, Responders of Colour is an exciting project from Glasgow Women’s Library combining creative writing with archives. In Responders of Colour, we gather together as a group of women and non-binary people of colour to examine depictions of women and girls of colour in our Girls’ Annuals archive – with annuals ranging from the 1920s to 1960s and more – and use creative tools to respond to these narratives. We take stories where women of colour have been spoken over and spoken for, and instead write our own, new narratives – responding to the history held in our annuals’ archive, and telling new stories with our imaginations and voices front and centre. 

‘it’s been inspiring to look at resources and to respond to them, its boosted my creativity and given me space to write and think in new ways.’ – Responders of Colour participant, 2021

In this online workshop via zoom, we’ll be thinking about one of these bastions of 20th century childhood – the annual – and explore how the contents reflect a certain vision of society in the 1960s and 1970s. We’ll consider our place in these books as women of colour, and using prompts we’ll write and respond to an archive and canon that so often excludes, objectifies and displaces experiences of the global majority. 

Whether you’re a regular writer or never picked up a pen before, this free workshop is an open space to explore the archive and key themes around Responders of Colour in a creative way. 

Nasim Rebecca Asl is a Glasgow based poet and journalist. Her work has appeared in magazines including Gutter, the Dark Horse and Modern Poetry in Translation. In 2021 she was awarded a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award for Poetry, performed on Damian Barr’s Big Scottish Book Club and was a digital writer-in-residence for The Poetry Business.

If you would like to know more about Responders of Colour visit here, or to book for our next group starting late Spring click here. To attend an in person workshop with Nasim as well on the 2nd April, click here. 

Booking

This event takes place online. For more information and to book, please email nadine.jassat@womenslibrary.org.uk. This event is for women* of colour and non-binary people of colour (16+).

*All women-only events are inclusive of Trans and Intersex women, as well as non-binary and gender fluid people who are comfortable in a space that centres the experience of women.

Accessibility

This session takes place via an online video call link.  If you have any concerns about how this will work for you, please do get in touch and we’ll do all we can to support you in joining the session.

An automated live transcript using Otter.ai is available during this event. See here for upcoming events where live captioning with Stagetext is arranged.