Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop with the Gulf Centre for Human Rights

I facilitated an eight-week Creative Nonfiction Writing Workshop for Arab women human rights defenders, in collaboration with the Gulf Centre for Human Rights. The workshop was conceived as a collective learning space where writing could function both as a creative practice and as a political tool rooted in lived experience.

The workshop aimed to strengthen participants’ capacities to write creatively about their work, their lives, and the conditions they navigate as activists. I approached creative nonfiction as a form capable of moving beyond institutional and advocacy language, allowing writers to document their experiences in ways that provoke thought, raise questions, and invite deeper engagement from readers.

Each participant worked on developing an original piece of creative nonfiction, which we shaped through multiple drafts, peer discussion, and editorial review. Rather than prioritizing a polished final product from the outset, the workshop emphasized process: writing as iterative, relational, and grounded in attention to both craft and care.

Over the course of the workshop, participants engaged in:

• Reading and discussing creative nonfiction texts on human rights, social justice, and political life
• Writing exercises during sessions and daily writing practices outside the classroom
• Developing a long-form essay of approximately 1,500–2,000 words
• Offering structured editorial feedback on one another’s work
• Revising their essays based on collective and individual feedback
• One-on-one sessions focused on refining the final version of each text

The workshop addressed a range of core questions and themes, including:

• Why we write, and for whom
• How to build and sustain a daily writing practice
• The stages of the writing process
• Point of view, voice, and narrative positioning
• Writing through exhaustion and writing about painful experiences
• Personal narrative as a form of political writing

The workshop was conducted online, allowing for sustained engagement across different locations, and was grounded in a feminist approach to writing, facilitation, and collective learning.