The Desert Nights, Rising Stars
Writers Conference

This session will demonstrate ways to create richly layered memoir via multiple genres and visual storytelling. Our lives and those of our ancestors leave traces in the human archive that include much more than photographs. Documents like immigration records, religious institutions, letters, newspaper clippings, government forms, song lyrics, even fingerprints, prison records, school assignments, local histories or ethnographic notes—can all be “mined” for creative inspiration, expanding and enriching the narrative of your family. In the same way, your story doesn’t have to be purely non-fiction; you’ll see examples that switch up poetry, short fiction, and cultural context research that engage readers more powerfully than straight narrative. We’ll brainstorm exercises for your own work!