VHS tapes, recipes, birth and immunization records, letters, heirlooms, passports, a shoebox of photographs — these are among the tangible artifacts that make up the family archive. Amid the tangible, we recognize the intangible and ephemeral matter, such as oral histories, songs, missing records, objects lost in migration now only filed in memory. How do we open a creative space for these often undervalued inventories? In this hybrid workshop, we will consider this question by engaging the work of multimedia writers such as Mary-Kim Arnold and Dianna Khoi Nguyen, and by experimenting with the familial materials that we’ve gathered, how to bring these documents and objects into our writing, and how to write into that empty gaps of what’s absent from the archive. Together we will spend part of the time viewing and discussing the selected examples, responding to generative writing prompts, and sharing what we create. Please have at least two artifacts with you (photo, object, document, etc) as you will think and write alongside them.

This is a 1-day craft class (3 hours long) on Wednesday, July 20th from 6:00 PM–9:00 PM ET. This craft class is open to all writers of color.

This event is cosponsored by Kundiman and CantoMundo.

Check out the class page for more information. To see all of our fall and spring classes, visit kundiman.org/online-classes.