Thrutopia.life is both "a writing masterclass and a regenerative-future think tank", making route-maps to a plausible future
From Thrutopia.life
In January we ran a post featuring the green activist Rupert Read’s concept of Thrutopia. As he explains it:
Thrutopias would be about how to get from here to there, where 'there' is far far away in time. How to live and love and vision and carve out a future, through pressed times that will endure.
The climate crisis is going to be a long emergency, probably lasting hundreds of years. It is useless to fantasise a shining sheer escape from it to utopia. But it's similarly useless, dangerously defeatist, to wallow around in dystopias.
We need ways of seeing, understanding, inhabiting, creating what will be needed for the very long haul. Visioning the politics and ecology of getting through.
We’re delighted to hear that the writer Manda Scott has concretely picked up Read’s challenge, and is setting up a storytelling and writers’ masterclass, at Thrutopia.Life. We asked Manda to expand on her rationale below.
Manda Scott: the Road to Thrutopia
Stories are everything. Whether we’re living in ancient Mesopotamia or in the W.E.I.R.D (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) cultures that are extracting everything from people and planet, one of the things that keeps us moving is that we tell ourselves and each other stories about ourselves and each other.
Every time we step out of the known we have a story we have told ourselves about the changes that are coming: a new relationship, a new home, a new job, a new way of life… Each of these is surrounded by internal and external narratives that shape the present and provide road maps to the future.
On a shamanic (or any spiritual) level, we recognise, too, that stories shape us and the way we are in the world. If we tell ourselves tales of futures that are full of decay and degeneration, pain and the worst of human nature, we are far more likely to reach them than if our storied futures are resilient, regenerative and an emergent property of all that is wonderful about humanity.
I have spent the past two decades writing historical fiction. This was on the basis, at least with the Boudica: Dreaming series, that if we saw who we were before the Romans came, we could abandon the last vestiges of the see-want-take value system they bequeathed us, and embrace a more regenerative, resilient way of living.
Partly, I believed this because when I did the dreamings from which the book arose, the incentive from the other worlds I dreamt was the assurance that this series would change the world. And the books did change my world. They have changed the way some other people see the world. But they haven’t (yet) changed the way our culture acts: in many ways, it’s more Roman than ever.
This isn’t surprising. Very few people will choose to step into a future they can’t envision. We have spent 50 years frightening people with the horrors of the world our climate, ecological and social emergency will evoke if we don’t act. While not offering visions of a future that we’d all want to race towards.
We have plenty of dystopias. Everyone, by now, knows how bad it could be. We have a few utopias of how good it could be if we all became different people living in a different way on a different world.
But what we lack in popular culture, are detailed, plausible, enthralling, inspiring route maps that take us from exactly here, to there, where ‘there’ is somewhere pretty much everyone would want to get to.
So then we need to write them. Lots and lots of us need to write them as soon as is humanly possible.
We need an entire generation of writers from seasoned professionals to people who have only just put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, writing in every possible form about the myriad possibilities of our future system, and how we take ourselves from here to there. We need novels, TV soaps, movies, plays, poems, children’s books, songs, blogs, pieces in the legacy press… all to shape futures that feel better than what we are living in now.
Which means those writers who understand the best of what is currently being explored, and who have the resilience to bring together a wide sweep of possibility into a coherent set of narratives.
We need a grasp of the nature of frames and how they work so we can speak across the current tribal divides in ways that bring people together.
We need the internal resilience to challenge our own frames and see where our own blind spots might be. Not as self-judgement, but because if we feel these, then others will too, and it’s our job to express the journey in ways that make sense.
This is not about getting everyone to think the same. It’s about creating a tidal wave of possibility that supplants the endless round of narratives where money, power and sex are the apices of success and the sole source of respect, love and connection.
All of which has led us to create the Thrutopia Masterclass. The name comes from a 2017 paper by Rupert Read in Huffington post - and Rupert is one of the speakers who will feed into the course [see head of blog for references - Ed].
Our aim is to create a hybrid between a writing masterclass and a regenerative-future think tank. So that anyone who has ever written or ever wanted to write – and who understands the urgency of this moment - can come together in community.
A group that will explore ideas, test out characters and story arcs on each other, work out where the holes are in our understanding of how to get from where we are to somewhere new and more inspiring.
There will be a website with an app running on which we can connect in between so that people can share ideas, create sub-groups to investigate more deeply into some of the topics we’ve brought up – or others that matter.
Finally, we’ve drawn in people from the related industries: TV, publishing, movies, theatre to talk about how best to reach the widest audience or the audience most likely to take the ideas and run with them.
Our absolute aim is to create a fertile ideas incubator, narrative generator and dissemination guide so that we can kick-start an entire generation of writers/creators/imaginers to build road maps forward. Maps that will carry all of us to a future we’d be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
The Thrutopia Masterclasses start on May 1st, and will run every alternate Sunday until October 16th. The thirteen primary Spark Sessions will start at 18:00 UK time (BST throughout) and the masterclass that follows will run until 21:00. Sign up at Thrutopia.life