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writing/workshop-packet/Intro.md

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+%title Introduction
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+Writing what's important to us helps us to build styles, language, and stories of shared meaning. Fandom and subculture spaces provide authors with a meta-genre of sorts in order to explore this shared meaning. By leaning on each other for support, the members can build up a corpus of their own, something that resists commercialization outside of those spaces, and builds a stronger sense of in-group community.
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+Over the last four months, I've had the privilege of running two writing workshops and four writing classes within the furry subculture.[^furryfandom] The first workshop took place at an online furry writing conference called [Oxfurred Comma](https://oxfurredcomma.com) hosted by the [Furry Writers' Guild](https://furrywritersguild.com), involving three authors learning about writing critique through the process of critiquing each other's work through a [Twitch](https://twitch.tv) stream visible to other attendees of the conference. The second took place at [Further Confusion](https://furcon.org), an in-person convention in San Jose, California, and focused on a more general set of sessions regarding critical reading and critiquing writing.
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+My goal with running these workshops and classes was to explore what specific aspects of fandom and subculture writing can be incorporated into writing workshops.
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+[^furryfandom]: It's quite common to refer to furry as a fandom as well. I resist this phrasing more on intellectual than moral grounds, simply because there isn't a core media that furries are a fandom. When asked, most furries will say that they're fans of anthropomorphic animals or, more poignantly, themselves.