Writing Workshop ⟡ Origin Stories
Details
LOCATION CHANGE: As Central Market is closed for Easter, we'll be meeting at Easy Tiger at the Linc!
Tired of small talk and today's atomized culture? Longing to expand creatively in a community that encourages big dreams, growth, and change? Want to find your voice and support others as they find themselves too?
Welcome! The Creative Friendship Lab encourages people from all walks of life to explore the rich emotional and social world around them, while pursuing individual and shared creative projects. Our Lab invites both serious artists and just-budding amateurs to come enjoy our events and experiments!
This group is a project by Difficult Friends: Website ⟡ Substack ⟡ Instagram
This Week's Writing Workshop
For our very first event, we'll be meeting at Central Market at 2 PM on April 5th to explore the theme of origin stories. Every epic begins with a spark in darkness—from Prometheus stealing fire to the flash-bang explosion that produced Professor Utonium's Powerpuff Girls.
Spring is here, bringing a season of new growth and change. To celebrate its arrival, we invite you to join the Creative Friendship Lab in exploring how you got started—as a writer, as a human being. Whether you're still in your chrysalis or feel like you're spreading your butterfly wings, it never hurts to have a moment of appreciation for time spent spent caterpillar-dreaming.
The rough structure of our workshop will be as follows:
- Saying hello to each other
- Introducing the writing prompt & discussing it in small groups
- Independent free-writing
- Sharing thoughts about the writing process in small groups
- Doing a special closing-out exercise as a big group
Thank you in advance for contributing your unique perspective to our workshop! Whether you’re just starting to explore your own creativity or you’ve been committed to it for decades, we hope you’ll join us in welcoming all members of this community in a spirit of vigorous encouragement, thoughtful engagement, and empathetic open-heartedness.
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Difficult Friends: Uniting Creative Friendship Lab x Dissent School
There are things that can only happen between people who are genuinely present to each other. Not performing, not managing, not carefully calibrating what they show.
Wholehearted creative collaboration is one of them. Real intellectual encounter is another. The kind of friendship that actually sustains people through difficulty is a third.
Difficult Friends organizes two volunteer-run grassroots projects in Austin: Creative Friendship Lab and Dissent School.
Our mission is to develop in members:
(1) creative confidence,
(2) intellectual independence, and
(3) the subtle skills needed to form close friendships.
We think it’s good to be a Difficult Friend.
Friendship itself is difficult to the degree that it is both genuine and built across difference. You will find our events creatively and intellectually challenging. They will put you in touch with people in ways that are energizing but unfamiliar.
But Difficult Friends are friends worth having.
Follow us on Substack or Instagram to get access to all our events. And please consider donating to us through our Meetup page. It really makes a difference.
Creative Friendship Lab's Session-Based Structure
This is a group designed to incubate close creative friendships. We run themed sessions that last 2-4 weeks of small, interconnected workshops and events. If you come to our sessions, you will get to know your creative cohort very well over a short time period. You will do cool work and make new friends who like to write, draw, take photos, etc.
Your session cohort will also have the opportunity to join a Signal thread just for people in that session. The link will only be shared at in-person events for that session. And the thread will be closed and archived after the session ends. The session thread is designed to let people from the session keep in touch during their workshop period. The thread closes to encourage people to carry out individual connections away from the pressures of a continuing group dynamic.
However, each event will also be able to stand on its own! So you should feel free to come by whenever, regardless of your attendance at prior events. We welcome first-timers always :-) Members are free to drop in and out of the Lab. We encourage everyone to feel a sense of freedom and lightness while doing as much or as little with the community as they please.
Creative Friendship Lab's Guiding Principles
“I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves
“In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.” – C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” — James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
"Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born." — Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin
Statement of Welcome and Inclusivity
The Creative Friendship Lab is for everybody!
We are an inclusive community space, and we particularly seek to protect and welcome our LGBTQIA+, queer, transgender, and nonbinary members. Event attendees may be asked to share their preferred pronouns and will be asked to respect the preferred pronouns shared by other participants. Women, immigrants, people of color, religious minorities, people with disabilities, and neurodivergent folks seeking a diverse community are also especially encouraged to attend!
That said, no particular identity performance is needed, desired, or expected from participants in our Lab. Come as you are and know you have a seat at our table, no matter how life has brought you into our community.
Empowering All Members to Lead
Creative Friendship Lab is a volunteer-run organization focused on encouraging members' creative confidence. Towards that end, we value all our members not only as attendees and followers, but also as continually developing community leaders.
The Leadership Skill Tree covers everything from the powers of one-time event attendees to instructions for becoming a Co-Organizer in our community.
We also offer an all-member feedback form. Please take advantage of it, knowing your feedback is important, helps us improve, and will be collected anonymously: https://forms.gle/rxP7J2XLqcZrLpwVA
Supporting Our Community
Most of our events are offered on a donation basis to minimize financial barriers. Please consider making a donation if you would like to contribute to our mission, allow us to offer more meaningful events, and help defray the costs of our meetup.com hosting fees.
Or not! We appreciate the many ways in which everyone contributes to our community, whether via financial or other means—simply by showing up and being kind, you are doing a good thing :-)
About Me (Personally)
I'm a writer living in Austin with my dog, Cookie. If you're interested in following my thoughts, you can find me at https://substack.com/@rachelsummercheong I love long essays, fiction, and philosophy. I also like to draw and go out dancing.