At the heart of ARAKU Coffee’s Bangalore flagship is a curated bookstore, with compelling voices from India and the world. Extending our commitment to the written word, we bring you a 2 day writing workshop. Two ARAKU classic coffees and cascara bon bons on us! 

The community-centered workshop by Rheea Rodrigues Mukherjee will have you writing, reading, and talking about things, people and places like you’ve never imagined before. 

Mukherjee is the author of The Body Myth. Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Buzzfeed, Scroll.in, Electric Literature, Out of Print Magazine, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She co-founded Bangalore Writers Workshop in 2012 and currently co-runs Write Leela Write, a Design and Content Laboratory in Bangalore. Rheea has an MFA in creative writing from California College of the Arts and has since been writing in the spaces of gender, social justice, mental health, and animal rights.

What is the workshop about?

There is no one formula to write an exciting short story. It’s all in the way you decide to interpret the world.

This intensive creative writing workshop is going to be fun, challenging and community-driven. It will hone your skills as a writer and build an appreciation for giving and receiving constructive critique. We’ll concentrate on the short story in this workshop. You’ll read a selection of global shorts that’ll fuel some pretty intense conversations on history, gender, society, science, politics, and sexuality. You’ll also respond to writing prompts and even write and edit your short story during the course of these two days.

Who is it for?

You don’t have to fit into any particular category to enjoy this workshop. You can be a bookworm or a person who has barely read this year. You can be published or have secret scribblings tucked under your bed. Just as long as you are excited to read, learn, and experiment.

We’ll really get into it, down to the arc of each sentence and the after-emotion of every paragraph. Oh, we should mention, you're going to make some new friends in this intimate workshop. You’ll understand just how powerful and exhilarating it is to bond with a group of strangers and express yourself through the written word.

This workshop is for adults (18+) who are passionate about writing, reading, and are looking for a tighter grasp on the craft of writing the short story. Beginners welcome.

DAY 1

10:00 am - 10:45 am: Introductions and ice-shattering 

10:45 am - 11:15 am: What makes the short story a short story? (We’ll compare a classic short and a modern short) 

11:15 am - 12:00 pm: The cliché (How to kill it + cliche worksheet) 

12 pm - 12:10 pm: ARAKU Coffee + snack break

12:10 pm - 1:00 pm: In Their Shoes - understanding the value of perspective and the power of moral grey areas. Exercise writing the day in a person who is very different from them. 

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm: Class Reading - The High Priestess never Marries + discussion

1:30 pm - 2:30 pm: Character mapping (SRK from DDLJ) and closing for the day.

DAY 2

10:00 am - 10:30 am: Homework reading discussion of Sleep + Yellow Wall 

10:30 am - 11:00 am: Vulnerabilities and Secrets (Group Exercise) 

11:00 am - 11:45 am: Writing exercise based on Vulnerabilities and Secrets 

12:15 am - 1:00 pm: What genre am I writing + writing time short story exercise 

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm: Critiquing skills 101 (narrative arc/sentence quality/thematic relevance/plotting/pace/ era) apply this to two stories we’ve already read in class. 

1:00 pm - 1:30 pm: The narrative arc 

1:30 pm - 2:00 pm: Short story critique in groups, talk about experience. 

2:00 pm - 3:30 pm: R is for Rejection (Rejection, publication, and literary magazines) + questions + reflections over ARAKU coffee + snack

Let's get cracking!