Re-Enchanting Ourselves, Our Planet, Our World!

Greetings Friends of Writing!

After the pandemic ended, after a long and difficult three years in which so many of our global ailments had surfaced and we could no longer look away, I did a small thing: I offered a five-week class called Writing the Fantastic. It came out of a desire to connect with the magic of transformation in literature, and to make community with others who sought the same. In collaboration with an incredible space here in Nassau, Bahamas, Poinciana Paper Press, in both online and in person classes, we touched the fantastic in our own psyches and in fiction, revealing truths we were living, and daring to imagine what we had not seen or lived before.

Each time a participant read her work, a story or scene, the air crackled with a kind of current – electric, powerful. And what I remembered is this: like myth, the writing of fantasy has the potential to connect with a creative force that is archetypal, that is forged in the deepest parts of our human psyches, and that literally vibrates with the power to transform writers and our readers. This is what I understand as ‘enchantment’. The power to (re)connect to the archetypal forces in us and in the world, and by doing so, tapping into the power to transcend oppressive circumstances, to create new worlds, and to transform the worlds we are living in. 

At our end of class reading, one participant said that writing the fantastic is like “wearing a pair of glasses that give clarity on the inside. Looking beyond the things we can see to what is possible.” Another participant said that when we write the fantastic, we see “what we want to see, and what we are afraid to see. It is healing,” she said, “realizing the possibility of manifesting a different world.” For other participants writing the fantastic was a “safe place” and “restoration”. And for yet another, it is “unsettled stardust” that when seen and touched brings us into the presence of the cosmos inside our own bodies and out there, in the vast universe. 

Teaching this class was a wondrous doorway into possibility, and has ignited in me a passion to continue making space for the fantastic, particularly as seen through the lenses of Caribbean literature and worlds. From an intro class, to writing memoir that blends life story with magical realism, to classes that invite us to write stories that wrestle with climate and social concerns, Writing the Fantastic is growing roots and unfurling new leaves in 2024! Particularly exciting is our new partnership with Sacred Islands Sanctuary, a Center for Healing, Transformation, and the Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life!

In a world where pandemics and superstorms can radically alter our lives in a single day, and where the past as slavery, as colonization, as genocide, as world wars still bleed into our conscious and unconscious minds affecting how we live in the present, we need the power of fantastic stories to help us heal, reconnect, envision, and create a new world. I invite you to be part of a community of the fantastic. To imagine, to witness, to write towards and beyond our wildest dreams. 

Here, dreaming,
Helen Klonaris
June 13, 2024
Nassau, Bahamas

Roots, Frida Kahlo

In Collaboration with Sacred Islands Sanctuary

Writing the Fantastic: Re-Enchanting the Earth

Begins July 11th!

Earth is a miraculous place. Teeming with life, from massive underground networks of mycelium to gentle manatees that roam the seas, Earth is home to countless incredible beings, including human ones. But our planet is in crisis. From superstorms ravaging small island countries, to fires devastating forests and neighborhoods, to thawing glaciers causing the imminent rise of sea levels across the globe, we are witnessing a suffering and disenchanted planet.

Scientists, activists, and Indigenous communities the world over have been calling for interventions to heal our Earth and to bring balance back to the great web of life. If fantasy in literature reveals possibilities where we had not thought to look for them, where we had not thought they existed, then writing the fantastic by tuning into our Earth and our more-than-human relations offers us a way to intervene.

In this eight-week online workshop, we’ll use myth, fairy tale, and the fantastic of all kinds, as well as the words and voices of some of the most thoughtful ecological writers today, to imagine climate interventions, non-human stories, and a re-enchanted Earth. We need wonder tales and fantastic stories now more than ever!

An eight-week immersion | Cost is $420 | Thursdays, 6pm-8pm EST | July 11-August 29, 2024. To learn more and register, please email helenklonaris@gmail.com.

In Collaboration with Poinciana Paper Press and Sacred Islands Sanctuary

Writing the Fantastic: An Introduction

Fantasy in literature reveals the unsayable, defies the impossible, and expands what we have been told reality is. Fantasy points to possibilities we didn’t know existed, and reveals aspects of our realities we did not know how to see. By exploring sources of the fantastic – from the collective unconscious to myths, folktales and fairy tales, as well as various forms of fantasy writing, from the mythic to magical realism and high fantasy, we will generate writing that helps us to transcend, ascend, descend, flow, and transform!

For more information, write to helenklonaris@gmail.com or sonia@poincianapaperpress.com

Writing the Fantastic: Crafting Wonder

Once we know where to look for the fantastic, we can begin to craft stories or poems that sing with archetypal power. What story is calling for you to sing it, speak it, write it into the world? If the fantastic transforms what we know, how might it transform the worlds we live in? What stories does the world need now more than ever? And, importantly, what are the craft elements we need to write them? This is a six-week course that will focus on a single writing project; we will spend time workshopping the craft of your poems or stories, so that the fantastic can shine. 

For more information, write to helenklonaris@gmail.com or sonia@poincianapaperpress

Writing the Fantastic: Re-Enchanting Ourselves

What if you imagined your life’s journey as an epic myth? As miraculous? As a wonder tale filled with overcoming obstacles, divine interventions, magical beings, and gifts of transformation? In this 6-week course we will explore the hero/ine’s journey in myth, and participants will translate life story into fantastic tales. We will consider what doing so tells us about our lives, the triumphs and tragedies we have experienced, and the possibilities of transformation the writing invites us to imagine, and perchance to live.

For more information, write to helenklonaris@gmail.com or sonia@poincianapaperpress.com

Writing the Fantastic: Re-Enchanting the World

Native American writer Leslie Marmon Silko wrote “Don’t be fooled. Stories are not just entertainment. They are all we have to fight against illness and death.” In a world where pandemics can radically alter our lives in a single day, and where we live often still suffering the harms of the past, whether personal, familial, or cultural, we need the power of fantastic stories to help us fight, heal, reconnect, and perchance envision a new world. 

For more information, write to helenklonaris@gmail.com or sonia@poincianapaperpress.com