Whether you’re a memoirist, biographer, fiction writer, or poet, objects can be used to unlock language, characters, memories, and your imagination. It’s no secret that objects can hold special meaning beyond their original functions. Open the junk drawer in your kitchen, go through boxes in your garage, peer into the corners of a closet and you’ll most likely find something imbued with a sense of the past, a particular time, a particular person. A set of keys to your first car, an old coat of your grandfather’s, a child’s tooth collected for the tooth fairy, an ashtray, a piece of costume jewelry. Objects can serve as associative prompts for any writer, and we’ll be exploring ways in which this works best for you and your writing. 

We will spend the week in a generative workshop using as prompts various ephemera and objects from life. Some of these objects will be imbued with meaning for you already, while others will be random objects that will only have meaning after you write about them. A week or so before our session, you’ll be tasked with collecting a trove of objects to bring to the workshop. 

There will be a little reading as well of works that use artifacts, such as Chris Mazza’s recent memoir, It’s No Puzzle: A Memoir in Artifact.

In this workshop, we will generate new writing through guided exercises and prompts; offer feedback/first impressions on writing you produce in our week.