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At the beginning of every year, my heart fills with excitement and fear. How many new people will join? Will they like this year’s programme? Will the workshops motivate them to write more? Most importantly will they get excited? I like it when people get excited. When they feel what they write matters, what they share has meaning for someone else.

We have completed half of this year’s workshops. We are non-stop writing about environmental issues. We go back in time, and remember how we used to consume and live when we were kids. What has changed? It’s quite scary to see how fast and easily we accepted and adapted to a consumerism-driven economic system. We’ve written a lot of pieces so far, and more will be added to this collective piece by the end of the year.

We will showcase some of this work at the Kreuzberger Hoffestspiele. The playreading will take place on the 22nd of June, Wednesday at 20:30 at the Expedition Metropolis Theatre. 

Three fantastic actors will read the piece. Bronwen Pattison, Cecilia Gigliotti, and Joshua Spriggs are wonderful additions to our team. We had our first rehearsal today, and they brought the entire text to life with just the first reading. I consider myself extremely fortunate and grateful to have met and to be working with such talented actors.

This year’s festival piece is written by:

Maria Vittoria Zinoni

Rebecca Lyon

A J Baker

Ece Ozdemiroglu

Tony Vale

Asena inceismail

Alice Rugai

Tom Kealy

Abdullah Öztürk

Storm Jackson-Payne

Natsu Hirukawa

Did you ever think about why some people refuse to believe in climate change? Why do they find excuses not to take meaningful action towards a sustainable life? Maybe denying the problem is a way of coping. The problem is so huge that the mind tries to save us from utter hopelessness by pushing aside thoughts of climate change. Denial kicks in as our minds default to temporary self-preservation.

It’s not because we don’t care. Climate change is disturbing. It’s something we don’t want to think about. So what we do in our everyday lives is create a world where it’s not there, and keep it distant. We create a sense of a good, safe world for ourselves, we screen out all kinds of information, from where food comes from to how our clothes are made. When we talk with our friends, we usually talk about something pleasant.

In our April workshop, we did an exercise called ‘I’m not a scientist but‘.
Would you like to try it?
Find three subjects that you have completely no idea about.
For example,
Marine biology
Cryptocurrency
German Grammar

Pick one subject. For example, you picked cryptocurrency. Write a monologue starting with
‘ I am not a broker but-’

The idea here is that you state your thoughts (whether for or against) on the subject which you have no idea about in a super confident way.

Have fun!

Did you ever climb a tree, plant a tree, have a favourite tree, or name a tree?
Share your own personal connection to a tree — either your “earliest tree memory” or “a significant tree memory.” with us. Sharing tree stories helps us place a spotlight on trees and become aware of their significance in all our lives.

Here’s a tree story from one of our writers, Rebecca Lyon:

‘ There were Beech trees, at the bottom of the garden. A regiment of them. In summer, their leaves were shiny, the greenest green, perfectly striped. Lizzie and I would score them with our fingernails to make distinctive epaulettes and put the leathery beech nuts in our potions of power made of mud and puddles and rocks.
Then, in autumn, the leaves turned to lace. We would look and look for undamaged leaves, amongst the fallen ones crunching beneath our little feet. Lizzie would find the most beautiful ones – translucent in the sun, veins perfect, delicate, as if reflecting their mother tree’s roots, in miniature. Lizzie said they were fairy clothes. I said that would be very impractical. Lizzie smiled at me. Her fairies, her beech trees, my glimpse into another world.’

Registration for our April workshop is now open. You can sign up here.