110. The Challenge of Imagining Thrutopias with Jennifer Browdy, Pt. 1 of 2 [H2]
BETH BARANY: Hey, everyone. Welcome back or welcome to How to Write the Future Podcast. I am your host, Beth Barany. I am an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer, also creativity coach, and writing teacher for science fiction and fantasy authors. I have this podcast because I care very much about creating positive, optimistic futures through our stories.
So I host other writers and thinkers and futurists and also share my thoughts on how to do that from the practical to the theoretical and everything in between.
So thank you very much for being here with us.
I'm very excited to bring a guest on today. Jennifer Browdy is my guest. So happy to have you here, Jennifer.
JENNIFER BROWDY: Oh, thanks for having me.
Introducing Jennifer Browdy
BETH BARANY: Oh, you're so welcome. I am really looking forward to today's conversation and to set everyone up so they know a little bit about you and the environment, which we're gonna talk about. I'm gonna read Jennifer's bio. I'm gonna introduce Jennifer to all of you.
And just a personal introduction.
Jennifer and I met through a community called Thrutopia, where we all came together to talk about how to create positive, optimistic versions of the future through our creative work, all kinds of creative work, started by Amanda Scott, author and thinker, and who has her own wonderful podcast called Accidental Gods.
I am going to read Jennifer's bio for everyone.
So Jennifer Browdy PhD is a professor of comparative literature and media arts at Bard College at Simons Rock and the Bard Open Society University Network.
She is the publisher of Green Fire Press specializing in books that make the world better and the author of several award-winning books, including Purposeful Memoir as a Quest for a Thriving Future, which is a Nautilus Gold Winner Award, 2022; The Elemental Journey of Purposeful Memoir, which is was a Nautilus Silver Award in 2017 and the memoir, What I Forgot and Why I Remembered, which was an International Books Awards finalist.
Her current work in progress focuses on necessary transformations for education in the 21st century, ideas she's sharing on her Substack blog, the Spirit of Education. She co-hosts a vibrant online community for writers, Birth Your Truest Story, where she also offers live on-demand courses in “writing to right the world and purposeful memoir.”
And for more information, visit Jennifer Browdy.com and we'll be sharing her website again at the end.
So thank you very much, Jennifer, for being here. I love all the work that you're doing and, I just have to say I'm very much in alignment with what you're doing, except more on the fiction side.
I see you're more on the memoir side, which is just wonderful.
So before I dive into our questions, the questions I have for you that thankfully, I love the questions that you provided for me, the great starting points. Is there anything that you want to say to my audience?
JENNIFER BROWDY: I want to add that I also teach for the Bard Open Society University Network course called “Leadership Writing and Public Speaking for Social and Environmental Justice.”
And that course is, I just started it today and, it's off to a good start. It has students from all over the world, places like Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Bulgaria, Belarus, Myanmar.
So some places that you don't usually get to interact with young people there. So to bring a group like that around the topic of leadership for social and environmental justice, which is really about envisioning a better future for us is very exciting.
And I'm also doing a short version of that course for a general audience for the Bioneers in March. I'm excited about that. I love the Bioneers and they're very much in, in alignment with all of what we've been talking about.
BETH BARANY: Yeah. Oh, that is so exciting and given I'm not sure when we're gonna air this, so we'll make sure we have reference links for everyone to follow up in case those timelines have shifted.
And in case you offer that course ever again, I would love to share with my audience how to stay informed about that. So that's fabulous.
It sounds like you have a lot of experience working with college age young people who are, and you've taught and are teaching a class called “Writing the Future” at Bard Open Society University Network. And also you've taught for many years at the Women Write the World, which I'd love to know what that is.
Can you say a little bit more about what are each of these groups: the Bard Open Society University Network and the Women Write the World?
And also tell us a little bit more about your “Writing The Future” class.
About Jennifer's “Writing the Future” class
JENNIFER BROWDY: Women Write The World is a class actually that I teach and I have taught for many years in person, in college, and then I now am teaching it online for this very diverse international group of mostly young women who come together to talk about basically, women's human rights issues as presented in literature and memoir.
So how that course has evolved is that I tend to choose memoirs by international women activists. And so we look at their lives as kind of models for how to do that kind of leadership in the world in some really challenging circumstances. And then, I always have the students writing their own visions. They research issues and they think about how they might take action on them and how they might emerge. And it's always a really inspiring class to, to teach.
The last time I taught it in the fall, I had some really wonderful students from Kyrgyzstan. One of them, her issue that she was concerned about was bride kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, which I never heard of actually, but apparently it's a big thing.
And the other students from Kyrgyzstan were like, yeah, this is a thing. So she was all fired up about that and did a lot of really interesting research and also a creative project documenting what happens.
So I always learn a lot when I teach these classes.
Jennifer's Trajectory
JENNIFER BROWDY: My own trajectory has been-- I was teaching classes called “Women Writing Resistance” in the nineties and early two thousands and I published two books by that title, two anthologies of Women Writing Resistance in Latin America and the Caribbean, and then Women Writing Resistance in Africa. I also taught a course on women writing resistance in the Middle East.
And and then gradually over time, I felt like the term resistance wasn't one that I wanted to engage with so much anymore. And what I really was more interested in was, is resilience and how we can grow towards the future that we really want to see in place. It's a subtle distinction, but to me, it's been meaningful that instead of pushing really hard against and thinking about how awful everything is in the world and what we don't want, I just shift the emphasis to, like you say, positive visions of the future that could be. So that's what I've been doing more lately.
BETH BARANY: Mm-Hmm. That's wonderful. I love hearing about your trajectory and also just envisioning all these different women from around the world coming to take your classes.
And I can see how empowering that would be to hear what have other people have done, what have other people done? And how can I take that and bring it to my particular issue and situation? I just love that. In your experience of working with young people, how is it that they have trouble imagining thrutopias?
While it's very easy for them to imagine different forms of dystopia? What's your take on
JENNIFER BROWDY: That? I think that our media landscape is saturated with dystopias and young people today are growing up in that environment. That's the sea they swim in. So when you ask them to step out of that sea and take a look around at what other possibilities there are, it can be really difficult for them.
And the resistance can sometimes take the form of skepticism. And I think skepticism is a facade for hopelessness. A lot of them are just really not very hopeful. So they scoff at the idea that there could be a better, a brighter future.
I was interested when I tried to offer my Writing the Future class through the Open Society University Network, I didn't get enough enrollment.
So I offered it in a small version on my local campus, but I wasn't able to do the international version, which was disappointing. And I think I think it, I do attribute it really to students feeling like this is not serious work in a way. Like they need to take more serious, like engineering, politics, business, computer science, those kinds of classes.
And my response to that is that the imaginative work that we do is absolutely essential. What a tragedy it would be if. It just disappeared. And actually, I don't wanna sound dystopic, but I think it's a possibility that it could just disappear or just dwindle down to little pockets, that, that are so far out of the mainstream that they're not that effective.
BETH BARANY: So you think it imagining positive futures will dwindle down? Is that what you're saying?
JENNIFER BROWDY: I'm, I hope not, but, in the university system, in the academic context, everything's going into STEM and business and computer science. The arts and liberal arts are dwindling.
So I guess that's where I'm getting my perspective from.
BETH BARANY: Yes. I see what you're saying. And it's true. A lot of the people working in the futuristic foresight space are coming from economics or systems thinking or the tech world. And, they aren't sitting in inside of the creative domains.
So this segues us to the next really juicy question here, which is why especially in the age of AI, generative or general AI, Chat GPT, and the like, why is nurturing, independent thinking, creativity, and imagination the most, maybe, the most important work of all?
The Problem with AI is that it outsources creativity
JENNIFER BROWDY: The problem with AI it's a very exciting technical advance, and we're all gonna be using it just the way we all use smartphones and Google. The scary thing about it is that it outsources creativity to a machine that only knows what's happened in the past. So it's been fed and it knows a tremendous amount, but it doesn't know about the future.
It can make predictions, but only based on the past and what it's been taught. Human creativity, the amazing thing about it is that we can come up with a thought that's never been thought before. We have these dreams that come to us that are totally unique and nobody but each one of us can have that particular perspective tied into our life experience and our culture and our location and who we are uniquely.
So I do, I worry that young people and people, in general, are not gonna value that unique creative expression that each of us is capable of.
And, it's a, it's almost a kind of laziness that I see in many young people. They just wanna do what's easier. So it's easier to get Chat GPT to come up with something and that's passable, which it can very capably, compounded by many people over this planet. That's a dangerous scenario.
We get intellectually lazy and creatively lazy in that way. So I worry about that.
Antidotes
BETH BARANY: Yeah, for sure. And so let's flip that. What are some antidotes to that?
So I have actually met young people who want to think for themself, who want to be creative writers, who want to generate their own life in a unique way, be creative entrepreneurs.
And they're like, where do I get started, even in the face of these tools?
How could I use these tools and still maintain my creative autonomy? Yeah. What do you have? What can we say to them?
JENNIFER BROWDY: By all means Yes, blessings to those people. And I meet them too, of course.
Yeah, the trick and I am just getting started with it myself, is how to make good use of the tools while not ceding our autonomy and our agency to them. And, so not being lazy about the way we use the tools, and I really do think it can be done. Maybe it's something like people say that Chat GPT is like a word calculator. A calculator for words. Certainly, we all love our calculators and, I, I couldn't survive without a calculator. But there are mathematicians nevertheless, who are doing, creative work that goes way beyond what a calculator could do.
So I think it's going to be like that. We'll Chat GPT for a very rote routine tasks, and maybe it frees us to be even more creative. Maybe it really shows us the difference between human creativity and the merely technical.
Let's by all means try and put a positive spin on it. Yeah, 'cause it's here.
BETH BARANY: Yeah. I heard, Wolfam, I think that's his last name. I forget his first name. The scientist and technologist. He was saying how with all of these tools, it really comes down to asking the question: what would we like? And being the decider.
It's not what the tool says. If we're gonna use it, then we're inputting our question, our prompt. And then when the output comes, then we can go: is this, does this work? Does this fit? Is this closer to my vision? And how can I take this as like first draft and, use it as a base, Lego bricks to play around with?
That's how I see the tool.
That's it for part one of my conversation with Jennifer. Stay tuned for part two, where we continue the conversation. Write long and prosper.
Write Long and Prosper
That's it for this week. Stay tuned to next week where I continue my conversation with Michael, about his book, Build Better Worlds.
And I just wanna tell all of our listeners to write long and prosper.
