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.
+Over the last four months, I’ve had the privilege of running two writing workshops and four writing classes within the furry subculture.1 The first workshop took place at an online furry writing conference called Oxfurred Comma hosted by the Furry Writers’ Guild, involving three authors learning about writing critique through the process of critiquing each other’s work through a Twitch stream visible to other attendees of the conference. The second took place at Further Confusion, an in-person convention in San Jose, California, and focused on a more general set of sessions regarding critical reading and critiquing writing.
+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.
++
-
+
-
+
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. ↩
+
+