Family History With Imagination
DATE: JUNE 18, 2023
TIME: 1PM – 4PM ET
COST: $50
It’s entirely possible to write factually about complex family history and harms while making space for creativity. Come explore ways of integrating empiricism, feeling, and imagination. Bring a pen, notebook, and index cards. Also, facts, questions, feelings, intuitions, synchronicities, speculations, and a sense of play.
This one-day online class overlaps a little with part of the Writing About Ancestor Trouble course I offered, but is structured to allow more people to join, and will focus on cultivating imagination around tough family histories and how to draw on creativity transparently in nonfiction while also prioritizing fact and establishing how the two intersect. Fiction and poetry writers, and writers of uncertain genre projects, are also warmly welcome.
The class is intended to be generative and supportive, and will be held as a presentation with writing exercises, occasional periods of participation by chat, and an opportunity for questions toward the end.
Suggested reading and the Zoom link will be provided one week before the class start date. A recording will be available for one month after the class date.
A request to participate indicates your agreement to preserve confidentiality around disclosures by participants and that you are entering the class in open-hearted good faith. The scholarship available for a BIPOC student has been claimed, as has the scholarship for an LBGTQI+ student, but please reach out if the cost is prohibitive. Fifteen percent of the proceeds will be split between the Manna-hatta Fund, the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness, and the Black-led Small Business Capital Fund of Mississippi.
House Rules
- Respect the mission. In signing up, you’re agreeing that you understand the course as described above and are showing up with an open heart, a willingness to be in community, and an intention to follow these rules.
- Keep classmates’ disclosures confidential. You agree that personal disclosures from fellow students are not to be shared beyond the container of our community.
- Be supportive as a default. Encourage and support fellow students. Call in rather than calling out. No one here is looking for cynicism or condemnation. There’s plenty of that elsewhere. That said, I welcome constructive feedback on aspects of the course and community. If problems arise, please do raise them with me.
- Discrimination or disrespect on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity, race, and/or ethnicity are not tolerated.