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Brianna Bembry

Intimate Genealogies: Crafting Story from Memory, Myth, and Artifacts | 2 Day Online Writing Workshop

$149.00

An undated photograph from girlhood, the memory of a past lover shared by an unreliable relative, a grandparent’s childhood home in a distant country…these are the sites and artifacts of lineage, tangible or otherwise, that can become unexpected wellsprings of inspiration.

Via text and craft review, Saidiya Hartman, an acclaimed Black woman historian and critical theorist, will introduce us to critical fabulation, a simultaneously historical and storytelling technique that begins to name the innumerable intimate and intricate possibilities of Black womanhood that are often lost from modern understandings of past and present. Intimate Genealogies notices the day-to-day value of this work and, using the writings of Black woman scholar Christina Sharpe as another guide, aims to bring this way of reading and writing the world into our personal archives.

Together, we will build full scenes from fragmented memories, family photographs, tall-tales or the “characters” we may have never known in an effort to cultivate intimacy with our own artifacts.

This course is designed to be a generative and welcomes beginners who are new to creative nonfiction writing or those seeking a new lens to apply to their existing practice.

2 class sessions
Saturdays, October 11-18
12p-2p ET
9a-11a PT
11a-1p CT

All class meetings will be held via Zoom. For more information on how to download or use Zoom, please click here.

    Course Takeaways

    • Learn how Black feminist scholarly texts can guide us in a new, embodied approach to non-fiction/personal writing projects
    • Begin the process of building a personal archive – one that can be tapped into in order to cultivate intimacy in their writing and respective writing practices.

    Course Expectations

    • All members of the course, students and instructor alike, are expected to arrive authentically, intentionally, and with an open heart toward one another and the learning process
    • Students should arrive having reviewed any assigned readings and completed any assigned tasks to the best of their ability. All course materials will be free and made available online
    • Students should join with an open mind toward sharing their work and/or process at the culmination of our time together and be ready to receive and offer constructive feedback

    Course Skeleton

    • Week One: Defining the Archive - In our first session together, we will work with texts from Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe, considering how language such as “artifact” and “archive” relate to ourselves as Black women and our unique practices – writing or otherwise. We will take steps toward curating a personal archive, beginning first with the artifact to which we have consistent access to: memory
    • Week Two: Designing the Archive - In this session, we will continue to think alongside Sharpe as we use her work as a guide to how tangible artifacts can serve as a threshold to a more intimate relationship with the past. We will practice critical fabulation in order to consider what it might mean to access memories, timelines, histories etc. that are not quite our own and how we may write from the archive with care

    We offer full refunds for cancellation with written notice up until 7 days before your class start date. From 6 days to more than 24 hours before class begins, we offer a 25% refund. If you drop a class less than 24 hours before the class begins or after it has started, you are ineligible for a refund.

    By signing up for a class, you agree to our refund policy and code of conduct here.
    Meet Your Instructor

    Brianna Bembry

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    Brianna Bembry is a Black woman writer and peer mentor currently based in Columbia, South Carolina, though her home and heart is in Brooklyn, New York. She holds a B.A. in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies and Education Studies from Wesleyan University.

    Brianna’s writing is moved by Black feminist (re)tellings and (re)imaginings of history; she is particularly interested in turning away from traditional means of research and representation, looking instead to what empirical work cannot always access – memory, feeling, and narrative – to uncover the truths about the past and present. Her culminating work as an undergrad, “Fatal Narratives,” blends creative nonfiction with academic theory and uses criminal cases of “mad, Black woman” as her guide to troubling social meanings of madness and sanity.

    Brianna is now nursing a new passion for bookmaking; she has recently printed and bound together a lyrical essay entitled “Conduits,” an exploration of memory and time as portals, set against the backdrop of a childhood shaped by the love and grief of two West Indian women.