Class Description
This program welcomes writers of all backgrounds and experience levels and was created to center and support BIPOC writers within our community. While writing that engages with race, culture, family history, migration, language, and heritage is welcome, it is not required.
For many communities, writing has long served as more than artistic expression—it has been a means of preservation. Long before official histories recorded the lives of ordinary people, poems, letters, diaries, and stories carried memories across generations. These personal archives have helped preserve cultures, languages, traditions, and ways of seeing the world that have often been overlooked, erased, or underrepresented in dominant narratives.
In this course, we'll explore memory as both an archive and a creative resource. Together, we'll build a sustainable writing practice rooted in observation, curiosity, and attention. We'll show up, notice the world around us, notice ourselves within it, and keep a record. Over time, you'll create your own repository of images, memories, questions, and experiences—a well you can return to whenever you sit down to write.
Rather than treating memory as a factual record, we'll think of it as something pliable—a material we can play with. The stories we tell ourselves about the past shift over time, and writing allows us to explore those shifts. Through generative prompts and guided exercises, we'll use memory to spark new associations, uncover unexpected connections, and generate fresh writing. You'll leave with practical strategies for transforming lived experiences and your lived truths into poems.
Along the way, we'll read and discuss work by a wide range of BIPOC writers whose work engages memory and belonging in distinct ways. Readings will include poems by Claudia Rankine, Natalie Diaz, Ross Gay, Victoria Chang, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Safia Elhillo. Through close reading, we'll examine literary techniques that can help us build richer, more resonant work while discovering how memory can become a source of both creative possibility and community.
This class is open to writers of all levels.
Writing Roadmap: We've created a simple, goal-based writing roadmap to help you find the perfect GrubStreet course for your writing needs.
This class will take place using Zoom videoconferencing. After registering, a yellow Resources tab will appear in this section containing a link to join class. Please note that you will need to be logged into view the Resources tab.
Zoom Participation:
In our experience, the intimate nature of a writing workshop benefits from on-camera participation. Students are of course welcome to turn their camera off whenever they need to, but it is a community norm for cameras to be on most of the time. You can learn more about using Zoom here.
Zoom Accessibility:
You can enable closed captioning at any time during the meeting by clicking the CC button at the bottom of the screen. If you'd like to access the transcript after class, please make sure to let your instructor ahead of time that you'd like a copy.