FALL WORKSHOP — Writing into Silence: A MemoryWorks Workshop for Asian Pacific Diasporic Writers
FALL WORKSHOP — Writing into Silence: A MemoryWorks Workshop for Asian Pacific Diasporic Writers
(Photo by Chris Gaul)
September 6, 13, 20, 27 & October 4, 2024
3:00-6:00 PM EST
This five-week remote workshop is for writers, story-tellers, and truth-tellers who are trying to trace elusive family histories across the Pacific. During our time together, we will experiment with creative tools and practices for re-searching and writing into intergenerational silences and historical erasures that are all too familiar within Asian Pacific diasporic families and communities. We will explore the shapes and forms these silences take—in the family, on the body, between nations—and how to re-fashion and re-claim them as next gen writers.
Each week, I will share with you some of the memory work tools and practices that emerged in the making of my book, Accomplice to Memory, and we will draw inspiration and example from other Kaya Press authors and API diasporic writers of how to write into the silences of the past, the disappearances of the present, and the imagined possibilities of the future. I will offer creative research exercises and guided writing provocations, and provide a safe and supportive virtual space to write together and workshop your writing with others. Whether you are just beginning to ask questions of the past, or you already have a project underway, you will leave this workshop with new tools and writing on the page.
Please note that in response to demand, this workshop has been expanded to five weeks. Scroll down for the full workshop schedule.
Registration Options (choose one from the drop-down menu below):
WORKSHOP ONLY: Includes weekly curated readings and examples of memory work, in-class guided writing and take-home writing provocations, and a structured and supportive small group environment for experimentation and feedback on new writing.
WORKSHOP + 1-ON-1 CONSULT WITH KIM: At the end of the workshop, you may submit up to five pages of writing to Kim and schedule a 30-minute, one-on-one meeting to discuss your writing in the context of your larger memory work project.
Registered participants will receive a Zoom link one week in advance of the first session.
Fall 2024 Workshop Schedule
Week 1: Shapes of Silence
What is the shape of silence? What tangible forms does silence take or leave behind—in the family, the land, the body? How is it even possible to see the contours of something that is not there? In our first session, we’ll trace the shapes and forms that silence has taken within our own families and communities, and begin to build the containers we need to hold them in our work of re-membering.
Week 2: What the Body Re-members
Where does silence reside in the immigrant body? How does it coexist with what the nerves and skin remember? What marks does it leave on the next generation and what do we do with memories of experiences we never had? In our second session, we’ll write into what the body re-members of things past—which is not necessarily remembrance of things as they were—and make something new out of the muscle memory we have inherited.
Week 3: Between the Hither and the Farther Shore
How does silence travel? What happens to silence borne out of one land when it is carried and transplanted into another—in what shapes and forms does it hide? How do we, as next gen writers, move in between this shore and that one without getting lost or losing ourselves? In our third session, we’ll explore the paradoxical meanings of “return” and devise maps, guides, and other tools for following silence that are rooted in our own dislocation.
Week 4: Pictures that Return Without the Story
What do we do with the great well of silences contained in family photographs? How can we enter these images and write into the unseen, the unspoken, the unknowable? What if we could tune our senses to that tiny spark of contingency in a photo where the present meets the past and the future rests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it? In our fourth session, we’ll experiment with hybrid tools for writing into and out of photos that have returned to us without the story.
Week 5: Writing Co-temporaneously (a.k.a. Everything Everywhere All at Once)
How do we do the work of re-membering in a time of disappearance—here, now, together? What sturdy containers do we need as next gen writers to simultaneously hold the silences of the past, refuse the obliterations of the present, and imagine the infinite possibilities of the future? In our final session, we’ll stand together in the present, re-membering, re-claiming, and writing into everything, everywhere, all at once.
Learn about MemoryWorks refund policy HERE.