Creative Research and Writing Practice for the Next Generation
MemoryWorks is a creative research and writing practice founded in 2020 by Q.M. Zhang, author of the award-winning hybrid book Accomplice to Memory, to address the urgent need both personally and collectively to recover and reclaim histories that have been not merely forgotten, but censored, buried, or erased.
MemoryWorks is designed for individuals and communities who are seeking to write the past from the standpoint of the next generation and those who follow: the inheritors of histories of war, migration, colonialism, slavery, revolution, and genocide. As next generation writers, we are deeply connected to and invested in the stories that we seek to tell, yet we are often faced with silences and erasures within our own family, community, and national histories. This is equally true for the children of migrants and refugees, the descendants of Indigenous and enslaved people, and the offspring of settlers and slavers—all those who write in order to imagine their proximity to history.
MemoryWorks begins with the questions we ask ourselves as next gen writers:
What do we make of the family stories we’ve been told alongside intergenerational silences, half truths, and outright lies?
How do we navigate the power of public histories and cultural mythologies that shape the ways we mis/remember our personal past?
What tools and forms do we need to gain access and give expression to a fragmented past that often lies in hiding from us, whether due to the aftermath of war, colonization, slavery, migration, or assimilation?
How can we embrace the standpoint of the “next generation” as not merely a source of nostalgia, but a site for looking backward and forward—reclaiming the past and reimagining the future—at the same time?
MemoryWorks offers a creative methodology for researching and writing into the gaps between what we have been taught to remember, what has been distorted or disappeared, and what we sometimes have to imagine to get closer to the truth.
MemoryWorks draws on a myriad of sources—images and objects, documents and dreams, maps and myths, conversations and hallucinations, policy and propaganda, the real and the imagined and the possible—and engages with hybrid forms of writing in order to approach an elusive past and produce innovative, genre bending stories that speak across generations and geographies.