Working on a picture book, poems with illustrations, or a graphic novel or comic book? Get grounded in expanded literature or the ways in which words and visuals can work together to tell stories. 49 Writers is offering a free workshop that will take participants behind the curtain to see the way literature expands into comic books, videogames, augmented reality, digital storytelling, and all sorts of other mediums like toys, puzzles and card games.
The workshop will focus mainly on picture books and how to craft stories using sequential art. Demos will include an introduction to writing and composing comic books, digital coloring, formatting picture books for print, and turning images into interactive experiences using augmented reality. Participants will have the opportunity to experience expanded literature projects in all states of production from completed published works to books and games currently in development. Special emphasis will be put on the way Alaskan stories have been told for generations and the ways they relate to contemporary storytelling methods.
The instructor Nathan Shafer will also walk participants though his expansive Denaliwood Arcade project, the shared universe structure that houses his storytelling projects including Dirigibles of Denali and Wintermoot.
There are limited spots available, so register now.
About the instructor: Nathan Shafer is a new media artist and author from Alaska specializing in augmented reality and digital humanities. He is one of the founding members of both the Meme-Rider Media Team, an art collective founded in 2000 designing early form internet memes, and Manifest.AR, the first international art collective making augmented reality works.
He was profiled by PBS Digital Studios and Indie Alaska as part of an online collaboration called The Future in 2014 and again in 2025 with This Artist Brings Alaskan Stories to Life with AR. He received a Creative Capital award in 2020 for his expanded literature touchstone project Wintermoot, a limited series of augmented reality comic books set in an alternate history Alaska.
He has contributed academic chapters to textbooks in the Springer Series on Cultural Computing, including Augmented Reality Art, Augmented Reality Videogames and Augmented Reality and Education, amongst others. He is a co-founder of the art collective Łuk’ae Tse’ Taas and has recently founded a mixed reality videogame studio, the Denaliwood Arcade, which is currently producing a series of AR videogames called Known Ravenspace.
Watch his most recent Indie Alaska video here:
And here are some examples of his expanded literature work using sequential
storytelling:
Goodnight Naruto Runners
Head Touches Place: The Black Pyramid