The Site of Memory: A Writing Workshop

This writing workshop will be an improvisational journey that invites participants to blend memory with fantasy, fact with fiction, imitation and revision into the creation of an extended story or personal essay. Students will read and respond to literature, free-write on a daily basis, and build their skills from one assignment to the next.  The classes will include short meditations, movement, music and poetry to help recover, revisit, and revise memories that may be new, buried, or long forgotten. As Toni Morrison said in “The Site of Memory,” “…..All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.  Writers are like that; remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.  It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is ‘our’ flooding.”