Instagram story viewer> @speculativeliterary> Posts

Speculative Literary

@speculativeliterary

1K

followers

228

following

a communal hub for programming and resources that promote literacy, collective study, creative writing, & liberatory praxis. 📚📝💌

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Edit 2: TONIGHT’S EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED! Due to a sudden family emergency + scheduling conflicts, we’re postponing tonight’s Salon to another date. Stay tuned for updated scheduling info!! Here are the three works we plan to discuss during our September Literary Salon, plus questions/prompts to get the discussion going! Of course, everyone’s invited to bring their own examples, books/stage play adaptations, and add to the discussion as well!

Thursday, Sept. 24, 7:30 pm at Apprentice Oak Cliff!
Free to participate, masks provided!

**psa: we Do Not and will Never use genAI for our posts! We remain committed to our principles of antifascism, promoting literacy, and artistic integrity** by @speculativeliterary

23

0

24 days ago

Edit 2: TONIGHT’S EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED! Due to a sudden family emergency + scheduling conflicts, we’re postponing tonight’s Salon to another date. Stay tuned for updated scheduling info!! **edit: we Do Not and will Never use genAI for our posts! we remain committed to promoting antifascism and literacy**
Join Speculative Literary DFW for a September Literary Salon, Thursday Sept. 24 at 7:30 pm! The theme: Book to Screen Adaptations!

Join us as we discuss some of our favorite (or least favorite) adaptations from the page to the screen, (either movies or TV shows), why they work (or don’t), and the purpose and utility of each medium as we build our media literacy together!

We’ll start with some of our own examples: “The Color Purple”, “The Hunger Games”, and “Moonlight”, but we invite you to come and discuss your own faves (or least faves) too!

Free and open to the public as always. Masks provided and encouraged.
RSVP 🔗 in bio

**edit: we Do Not and will Never use genAI for our posts! we remain committed to promoting antifascism and literacy** taken in Apprentice Creative Space by @speculativeliterary

50

0

a month ago

DFW Friends! Speculative Literary is hosting a Letter Writing Workshop on Thursday, August 27, at Apprentice in Oak Cliff starting at 7:30 pm.

Join us this Black August as we discuss the use of letter writing for personal, creative, and political practices. Then, practice a little letter writing of your own to political prisoners like the Prairieland Defendants and others.
Free to attend, open to all, masks provided and encouraged.

Featuring new facilitators of the DFW Speculative Literary space!
RSVP 🔗 in bio taken in Apprentice Creative Space by @speculativeliterary

66

0

2 months ago

Hello Storytellers! 🏳️‍🌈💋 Sapphic Storytellers is hosting a Creative Writing Workshop in partnership with @jasmrenea from @speculativeliterary at @apprentice.oakcliff ! 📝📚💬

📆 When: Thursday 7/9 | 6:30-9:30pm
📍 Where: Apprentice Creative Space 919 Morrell Ave #110, Dallas, TX 75203
👥 Who: This event is exclusively for 18+ sapphic-identifying queer people! 🏳️‍🌈👩‍❤️‍💋‍👩🏳️‍⚧️ This is a trans-inclusive space and we do not welcome TERFs. Open to all writing experience levels.

📖 In this workshop, we will analyze the work of Jacqueline Woodson, an African-American lesbian author who explores race, class, and family history through her lyrical writing style. We will talk through writing craft techniques and provide time for generative writing with prompts.

🎟️ RSVP link in bio, tickets are free!

Excited to see you all there!💋 by @speculativeliterary

205

1

4 months ago

Thank you so much to everyone who attended Summer Sonnets this Thursday night! You all were incredibly brave and phenomenally talented and truly made this evening special 🫶🏾

This themed reading and open mic served as our final event of the summer here in North Texas, but stay tuned cause we’re not going anywhere! Community members are coming up with tons of ideas on how to continue programming here and I’m so eager for you all to share in co-creating the space 🤎 ATLiens, SpecLit is otw! ✈️

Swipe to read a longer thank you message from our steward @jasmrenea and to revisit the night with shots 📸 by @kerubo.pdf and @jasmrenea taken in Apprentice Creative Space by @speculativeliterary

40

0

4 months ago

The ~vibes~ we’re hoping to cultivate at Summer Sonnets - Themed Reading and Open Mic this Thursday 6/25 at Apprentice in Oak Cliff. Bring us your best (or worst). Link in bio to RSVP as an attendee or performer ☀️💐🎙️

Audre Lorde, photographer unknown

John H. White, “Family Enjoying the Summer Weather at Chicago’s 12th Street Beach on Lake Michigan” 1973

Liz Johnson Artur, Black Balloon Archive’s, photograph, C-Type colour print

Eileen Perrier, “Untitled” from the series Afro Hair and Beauty Show, 1998, from Shining Lights by Joy Gregory (ed.) (MACK, 2024)

Giles Moberly, “Talbot Road, 1997”

Imani Khayyam, “Aunjanue Ellis” for Bitter Southerner, 2020

Emily Manwaring, “Can’t let the summer past” 2020

Jasmine Butler, “Summer Sonnets” 2026, digital collage by @speculativeliterary

45

0

4 months ago

Summer is here and we want to hear your best work! Join SpecLit for our much awaited summer-themed live reading and open mic 💐🌞

We want to hear about your steamy summer flings, your warm weather melancholy, your funniest vacation encounters, your dreamy odes to the summer sun, and everything in between. Open to all, no experience reading in front of a crowd or previous participation at a SpecLit event necessary! Come show off the power of your pen ✍🏾 in front of a supportive audience in the vibiest space provided by @apprentice.oakcliff

RSVP link in bio - let us know you’re coming, and grab a spot at the mic! Performance slots limited, let us know in advance to secure your spot as there will be limited day of sign ups.

See you there, tell a friend! 🤲🏾💃🏾 by @speculativeliterary

142

1

5 months ago

This month, SpecLit is going analog 📬 Join us for a letter writing workshop on May 28th @apprentice.oakcliff ✍🏾

Letter writing is an ancient mode of communication, personal archiving, and connection. Some of my earliest memories include writing letters back and forth to my grandma, and we continued this practice up until her passing 💐 Learning at a young age that you don’t need anything but pencil, paper, and a stamp to make yourself heard and keep connection alive has become a foundational tenet to my writing practice. I hope this workshop will introduce you to the joys of keeping a penpal and even writing letters to your past and future self 💌

Come out to discuss your favorite epistolary (def: a book or text written in the form of a letter or series of letters) texts and write letters to your homie-lovers on fun stationery! There will also be information on current political prisoners in the United States and information on how to write to them and/or become a penpal for an incarcerated comrade.

Hope to see you there, bring a friend! RSVP link in bio 🔗 blue background, green text describing letter writing workshop on may 28th at apprentice oak cliff at 7:30pm by @speculativeliterary

117

0

5 months ago

Can’t say enough how grateful I am for this community we’re building around literacy and worldbuilding 🥹 Thank you to everyone who came out to our second iteration of Essay Club! We had much needed conversation around crises, collapse, systems failure, and building resilient communities that can survive into a future we build together. Thanks again to our selected writer, Sol Elias, and the Scalawag team for publishing such beautiful prose that gives us language for being Black/brown/Queer southerners living through the end of the old world and ushering in the new.

Essay Club is for the readers and the thinkers who may not have time to read a whole book a month in time for a book club, or who simply want to read more essays. At the core of this offering is our collective reading method where we take turns reading aloud from the text so that everyone in the room, regardless of their literacy skills or whether they had time to read in advance of our meeting, can fully participate and engage with the material. The vulnerability in this space is so sweet and I can’t wait to continue our Summer of Literacy together.

Stay tuned for info on May’s offering, a letter writing workshop, hosted at Apprentice Oak Cliff on May 28th. We’ll also be writing together at Aura Coffee in Denton on May 30th from 4-6pm. No matter where you are on your literacy journey, we’ve got an open door policy and lots of dreaming to do ✨ taken in Apprentice Creative Space by @speculativeliterary

21

0

5 months ago

Sharing some of the slides from our first ever essay club last month so yall can catch the vibe! 🤓

~ Reading and literacy are deeply political.
~ We live in a society that thrives off of oppression and exploitation, setting many of us up for failure from a young age beginning with our education system.
~ There are entire systems worth billions of dollars in wealth built atop our illiteracy, disorganization, and inability to demand more.

Taking a page from the book of the Black Panther Party and the Cuban Revolution, we’re reading out loud together to ensure no one is left behind because of their current literacy skills. We lift as we climb—reading is for everybody, and at Essay Club we live by this!

Join us tomorrow at 7:30pm for our next essay club where we’re reading Sol Elias’ recent essay in Scalawag Magazine, “The Parables Are an Autopsy: The Black and Global Southern Parables of Collapse.” Together we’ll discuss speculative fiction, climate catastrophe, and how we may shift the course of our future—together. Link in bio to RSVP 🔗 by @speculativeliterary

27

1

6 months ago

Thank you to everyone who came out to the first session of Writing for Our LIves! 💐 We had such a sweet group and everyone bravely shared a bit of their writing to close out the space. We had first time writers and seasoned folks in one space to spend two uninterrupted hours writing whatever we were called to. Many folks used the prepared prompts to loosen up, and not a pen in the room stopped until the very end. So proud of you all, and can’t wait to welcome more of you next month 🫂

We’ll be right back here at Aura coffee the May 30 and June 27 ☕️

In the spirit of Octavia E. Butler, we write into existence the worlds we wish to create 🌍✍🏾 taken in Aura Coffee by @speculativeliterary

37

4

6 months ago

For the writers in the house ✍🏾👩🏽‍💻

Speculative Literary’s spring/summer 2026 writing group is here! Write For Our Lives is a monthly generative writing group meeting on the last Saturday in April, May, and June @auracoffeedtx in Denton, TX.

Writing often gets credited as a highly independent art form, but here at SpecLit we believe that often the best work is created in/with/for your community, in response to and in relationship with our real lives. Especially in a time when we’re increasingly being encouraged to hand over our mental and creative faculties to big tech, it’s critical that we retain our own voices and imaginations.

Whether you’re a beginner writer or a seasoned professional, if you’re looking to experiment with poetry or polish off your novel—this is the space for you! This is a low stakes, high reward opportunity to dedicate consistent time to your writing practice this spring/summer in community with others. Link in bio to RSVP 🔗📝 taken in Aura Coffee by @speculativeliterary

90

0

6 months ago