Writing the Englischer Garten

Location: conference room, fourth floor, RCC

with Landhaus Writer-in-Residence Angela Antle

Writing spontaneously and together can be a transformative act of resistance. While all qualitative methods are leaky, creative writing continues to be undervalued in academia as knowledge making that can redirect flows, challenge assumptions, and dissolve boundaries.

This is a two-part (two-hour) workshop.

Hour 1: Writing-lab participants will be given five, color-coded, blank cue cards. Blue is for words representing feelings (affect), pink for action (verbs), yellow for objects, white for sounds, and the green cue cards… are wild! The card idea comes from the “decompositional and recompositional” game described by Dominic Boyer in No More Fossils (2023). We will walk through Munich’s Englischer Garten gathering words and phrases to describe the sputter of bees, a scooter girl gliding through a tangle of dog walkers, and the sheen of pollen on river rocks. This exercise aims to tap into what Timothy Morton in All Art Is Ecological (2021) refers to as the telepathic, “truthy” ambiguity, and power of art.

Hour 2: The flash-fiction writing lab. The group will return to the RCC, and, using a prompt developed by Sheena Wilson and Lisa Moore in We Were In It: Stories About Energy Transition (2025) as well as the gems we have collected on our cue cards, we will write for 30 minutes.

The words you collect on your cards and the prompt will ground a 500-word flash-fiction piece in the energy of the park and may also contest capitalist and technical flows, stretch and perhaps rupture our sense of time and place, and reflect critically on the current polycrisis while avoiding what Greg Garrad (“Ecocriticism and Education for Sustainability,” 2007) refers to as the “wilderness epiphany” in nature writing. In the last half hour, those who feel comfortable can share their stories.

The workshop is limited to 20 people. To sign up, please email pauline.kargruber@rcc.lmu.de.

Angela Antle is the 2025 Landhaus Writer-in-Residence, a multidisciplinary artist, documentary-maker, interdisciplinary PhD candidate (Memorial University of Newfoundland), and a member of Norway’s Empowered Futures: A Global Research School Navigating the Social and Environmental Controversies of Low-Carbon Energy Transitions.

This is an Environmental Writing Studio event. To find out more about the RCC’s writing studio, please go to this tab.