Step Inside: Documenting Our Interior Journey in an Unusual Time

Many people are recording their experience of the COVID-19 pandemic to make sense of things, retain sanity, and remember. This series of 3 workshop sessions aims to give writers the tools to capture the deeper experience behind our current circumstances –– not just what we do (or don’t, or can’t) but to explore our interior experiences and the meanings we create from them. Sessions will focus on responding to writing prompts, sharing writing, and giving and receiving feedback on work from fellow participants and the facilitator.

Please note that attending this workshop series will require all participants to be visible to the facilitator and fellow participants through their web cameras.

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Session 1: Light Within [Fri, 3 July 5pm–7 pm]
In this unprecedented time, what has inspired us? Ignited our resilience? Prompted us to be more adaptable, kinder, more compassionate? Do we see humanity, society, differently now? How do we see ourselves? Have we evolved or changed?

Session 2: The Unexpected [Sat, 4 July 11 am–1 pm]
The experience of the circuit breaker holds many firsts for all of us. Introverts who have prized alone time may have been surprised to find themselves missing spontaneous human interactions. What have we learned about humanity and ourselves –– which we never expected?

Session 3: Dealing with Our ‘Dark’ Emotions [Sun, 5 July 11 am–1 pm]
Anger, resentment, irritation, frustration. What are some of our uncomfortable emotions and reactions that have emerged in response towards circumstances, towards others’ behaviours in society, towards people we encounter or live with? Writing prompts invite participants to delve into these experiences and allow themselves to acknowledge complex emotional reaction, as a means of processing them and growing in understanding and compassion for themselves, while crafting them into documentary micro-narratives.

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Melissa De Silva is the author of “Others” is Not a Race, about Eurasians in Singapore. It was awarded the 2018 Singapore Literature Prize in the creative non-fiction category. Her fiction has been published in Best New Singaporean Short Stories: Volume Three, Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and LONTAR: The Journal of Southeast Asian Speculative Fiction.