A great article featuring winning writer Mokeira Gekonge from our 2020 Digital Mouthful Monologue Festival.   Read it below, and then check out the Monologue Festival Performance!

by: Catherine Sorrentino

Writing, like any art, is often a tool of protest and social activism. Speculative fiction and plays allow for creative writing to challenge, rather than uphold, our current circumstances. In a recent Worldbuilding Intensive hosted by author Jelani Wilson and PYP teaching artist Mr Stine, young writers were given the opportunity to imagine fantastical and futuristic worlds to examine our present. Ready to explore another world? Here’s something from student Brenden Dahl, who explains his inspiration below.

"When I attended Jelani’s previous workshop with the PYP Resident Playwrights, I began to create the dystopian world of my story. He told us to pick an issue with society today, and create a fictional world where that issue is taken to the extreme or otherwise explored in depth. I chose the issue of corporate data mining, and created a world where nearly all cloud-stored data has been destroyed through a massive server crash, and every remaining piece of information from the past is controlled, hidden, and weaponized by an elite ruling class.The following is a few pages that I worked on in PYP’s Summer World-Building Intensive."

Writing by: Brenden Dahl (CLICK READ MORE ------>)

by: Catherine Sorrentino

​Writing, like any art, is often a tool of protest and social activism. Speculative fiction and plays allow for creative writing to challenge, rather than uphold, our current circumstances. In a recent Worldbuilding Intensive hosted by author Jelani Wilson and PYP teaching artist Mr Stine, young writers were given the opportunity to imagine fantastical and futuristic worlds to examine our present. Ready to explore another world? Here is the creation of student May Zheng.

Writing/Image by May Zheng (CLICK READ MORE ------>)

by: Catherine Sorrentino

Writing, like any art, is often a tool of protest and social activism. Speculative fiction and plays allow for creative writing to challenge, rather than uphold, our current circumstances. In a recent Worldbuilding Intensive hosted by author Jelani Wilson and PYP teaching artist Mr Stine, young writers were given the opportunity to imagine fantastical and futuristic worlds to examine our present. Below I’ll be sharing my own work and the way that the Intensive inspired me. 

When I began the Worldbuilding Intensive, the other participants and I were encouraged to draw from societal issues. Together, we created a dystopian world where, in the aftermath of global war and disease, technology has emerged as the backbone of society. I imagined a world of constant surveillance and unmitigated innovation, where technology has been pushed to extreme uses, even replacing human law enforcement.  After I finished brainstorming, that world didn’t feel far away from the world we live in now.  This seemed to suit the tension and watermelon of a mystery thriller, and I wrote about a young man accused of and arrested for a crime he didn’t commit. What follows is the beginning of that story.

Writing by Catherine Sorrentino  (CLICK READ MORE ----->)