About This Lesson

Memory Work: Creative Writing and Re-assembling ourselves through Story

In North By Current, we encounter a teacher in the form of a child’s voice. This child’s wisdom leads us to consider the way that: “Memory must be created against an abundance of information. But also against an absence. It has to be constructed. You assemble the fractures, arrange the incidents, to build a story.” For every story we choose to tell there are hundreds that we don’t, and the ties that connect our past and the future selves are entanglements of narratives that give texture and meaning to our lives. Creative writing is one approach to tapping into memory and imagination as sibling forces in processes of meaning-making and storytelling. This work allows writers to put pieces of a past together towards a future vision of possibility.

In this lesson students will engage in “memory work” through practices of creative writing and revision. They will move through stages of the writing process, understand key components of the craft, study models of literature that serve as examples of these genres, and support one another through collaborative revision processes that encourage re-vision, trust, and confidence in their own voices and narrative points of view.

A Note to Teachers 

In this lesson you will be asking students to do “memory work” as they construct a story or poem that stems from personal experiences with one another, to workshop, revise, and offer feedback. Before doing this you need to be sure you’ve established a community of care within your classroom and that you remind students that what they will be writing will be shared with one another. This allows students to use their own discretion about what memories they will call forth into the work of creative nonfiction.