Rosellen Brown

Workshop: Childhood: Reading, Writing, Remembering Imagining (or re-imagining) childhood is one of the slipperiest challenges a writer of fiction, poetry or memoir can take on. How does one – can one? – write an authentic-sounding child's voice? By what means can we transform our own experience into something artful, coherent and emotionally compelling? From what distance is the story best told, in what kind of language, in what tone – animus, affection or 'objective reportage,' in the spirit of chronicle? We will make brief forays into film and graphic memoir and our reading will range from psychologist Ernst Schactel to brilliant observers of childhood like Vivian Paley, and onward to Babel and Woolf, Elizabeth Bishop and Gwendolyn Brooks and to younger writers like ZZ Packer, Yiyun Li and Uwem Akpan, all of whom have long memories and many (borrowable) strategies for evoking them. This workshop will invite short weekly contributions of real and imagined recollection in any genre – brand-new and provisional – and one longer culminating project.