Writing with the Family Archives

Catalog description

VHS tapes, recipes, birth and immunization records, letters, heirlooms, passports, a shoebox of photographs, old laptops — 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 class we shall read several texts of poetry and hybrid nonfiction that grapple with familial documents & materials, while, at the same time, beginning our own archival projects. We shall raise questions about the kind of research this project entails, the ethics of writing about kin, how to work creatively with photographs, audio, objects and documents, and how to write into that empty gap of what's missing from the archive.