This year, Conflux offers four workshops designed to help you find and develop your original voice and story, and to build effective, believable, and unique worlds and characters.

L.E. Daniels

Magic Realism for Rebels​
Magic realism conjures the imagery of Frida Kahlo and Henri Rousseau and is something Salman Rushdie calls “a newish name for a very old thing.” Propelled across the literary world by Latin American writers of the 1950s, magic realism has deep, dark roots for storytellers that tangle with colonialism, disobedience, and subversion. Magic Realism for Rebels reintroduces this genre favourite with writing prompts along its elements, contours and many invitations. Respectfully, we’ll enter where personal and wider histories converge in kitchen wisdom, folklore, and social contemporary messaging.
 
A Shirley Jackson, Bram Stoker Award®, Aurealis, and Australasian Shadows finalist, L. E. Daniels, BA MFA, is an author/poet, the editor of 140+ titles, and an American living in Australia. Lauren directs Brisbane Writers Workshop.

Zena Shapter

Out Of This World-building!
Give your story the lift off it deserves! Extend your foundational knowledge in this advanced worldbuilding workshop that will help transform your ideas into authentic, convincing, and compelling story worlds. We’ll look beyond the everyday essentials and explore unique cultures, food, games, power resonance, belief strengthening, world as character, and much more! Discover how to not only set the stage, but to embellish and integrate your worldbuilding to entice and enthral readers, with practical exercises to show you how.
 
Zena Shapter is the multi-award-winning author of ‘When Dark Roots Hunt’, ‘When Dark Waters Burn’, ‘Towards White’, and co-author of ‘Into Tordon’. She’s a “master of immersive worlds” (Tawny Frogmouth Magazine), who creates “cold and brutal” stories (Tor.com) that "deserve your attention" (Lillian Csernica, Tangent Online). An inclusive creativity advocate, writing mentor and editor, she’s online as @ZenaShapter and zenashapter.com 

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Kaaron Warren

The Words They Left Behind: Using Ephemera to Inspire Stories
Have you ever found a photo in an old book? A shopping list in a drawer, a recipe on the back of a notebook, a box of old postcards at a school fete, an inscription in a book that broke your heart? Kaaron Warren has found these and more, always wondering about the person behind the items. Who were they, and what did these things mean to them? We can tell stories around found postcards, telegrams, menus from cruise shops and more, things that were once important to strangers. These are clues to be built on, lives to be imagined. We’ll examine this ephemera in detail, developing character profiles around them. We’ll write the stories of these forgotten pieces of people’s lives.
We’ll make those pages live again.
 
Shirley Jackson award-winner Kaaron Warren has published seven novels, eight short story collections, and over 150 short stories. Her most recent is the art book Spirit Level, with Monica Carroll. She’s taught workshops in haunted asylums, old morgues and second-hand clothing shops and is an avid collector of strange things.

Russell Kirkpatrick

The Map Workshop
Russell’s map workshops are legendary. He’ll come armed with professional cartographic experience, a back catalogue of fantasy novels and an innovative approach to constructing secondary worlds. All materials will be provided: all you need to bring is an open mind and a good working knowledge of your work in progress. In the two hours you’ll learn how to draw the crinkly bits, what to put in and leave out, and how to make the map an artefact of the story.
 
Dr. Russell Kirkpatrick is a fantasy author and Geography lecturer. Originally from New Zealand, he now lives in Canberra.