RIGOROUS BUT REWARDING
The short story is an all-terrain vehicle for transporting writers and readers to familiar and foreign frontiers: attraction, romance, or love; grief, loss, or tragedy; and friendship, belonging, identity, or migration—there is no place the short story cannot go provided a writer is brave and skillful enough to take it there. In fact, short stories are an essential and common unit of communication: they are utilised in everyday speech to recount the daily and obscure happenings of one’s life, spread salacious gossip, and share jokes. The short story, then, is quite well known. In honing one’s craft as a short story writer, one commits to learning the most intimate details of human life; imagining and conceptualising past, present, and future realities; and constantly seeking new ways to engage the reader. The short form is a rigorous but rewarding medium: it challenges a writer’s process while encouraging new approaches to language, character creation, and plot synthesis.
In the first Doek Workshop, the short form is dissected into its elemental constituent parts to reveal the numerous storytelling avenues available to writers when seeking or conceptualising a short story narrative. The workshop also provides insights into writing processes and equips participants with reading lists to further their investigations into this ever-changing literary form.
FACILITATOR
Rémy Ngamije • Doek’s Founder • Chairperson • Artministrator
Rémy is a Rwandan-born Namibian writer and photographer. He is the founder, chairperson, and artministrator of Doek. He is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Doek! Literary Magazine.
PARTICIPANTS AND TESTIMONIALS
Roxane Bayer • Charmaine //Gamxamûs • Azania Makoena
“The workshop was a fantastic learning experience. It gave me valuable tools for writing short stories. It made me think deeply about what to include and exclude when conceptualizing a story and the essential elements needed to create a great narrative. I find that I let my fears get the better of me in the planning and research phase of storytelling; I learned methods of sorting through the ideas in my head so that I can create a comprehensive plan for the story. All I need to do now, is write.” — Charmaine //Gamxamûs, radiographer and aspiring writer.