“Inside the word ‘emergency’ is ‘emerge’; from an emergency, new things come forth. The old certainties are crumbling fast, but danger and possibility are sisters.” Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark 

In the above quote, Rebecca Solnit offers us a different way to look at crisis. Instead of thinking of any kind of crisis as world-ending (an emergency), we can look at it as a possibility, as something with potential. We can ask ourselves what might emerge from this. 

This is a useful, not to mention uplifting, way to look at a crisis, and can be helpful when things are difficult. In this workshop, we’re going to take the idea a bit more literally, though. We’re going to think about what kinds of writing might “emerge” from our feelings about crisis, and what we might be able to make out of existing writing on emergencies.