On Saturday, assistant professor Erica Allen-Kim will co-lead an online storytelling workshop, hosted by Myseum of Toronto, in which she and a group of other academics and artists will coach participants through the process of writing speculative fiction about a post-COVID-19 world.

Speculative fiction (a category of fiction that includes, but is not limited to, science fiction) is often a way for writers to explore the consequences of large-scale disaster. Many speculative fiction authors have written about world-destroying pandemics. Allen-Kim and her co-facilitators will be leading participants down a more optimistic speculative path: each of the workshop's stories will be set in 2050, in Toronto's Chinatown, and will imagine how lessons learned from COVID-19 have taken root in the years since the end of the crisis.

The workshop will be conducted with online videoconferencing software. No writing experience is necessary. Instruction will be in English, but Mandarin and Cantonese speakers can be accommodated upon request.

The workshop takes place on April 25, starting at 1 p.m. For more information, visit the registration page.

Anyone who doesn't want to write a story, or who doesn't manage to snag one of the workshop's limited seats, can sign up to attend the storytelling portion of the event, during which participants will share their work. The registration page is here.