Radical Reimagining: Growing the Archive with Shawna Kay Rodenberg

Dölen Perkins-Valdez says that, “Somewhere between written and oral traditions is a space the imagination can fill.” Excavating the past can be especially intimidating for those of us who come from places where history is kept through oral traditions or inscrutable scraps of information. Words like ‘exhaustive’ are often used to describe bodies of knowledge, but this is the language of patriarchy, and it is possible to think of research instead as tending history, caring for it, and even growing it through the close observation of relics, creative counternarratives, and acts of imagination. For those of us trying to know ourselves through the past, this process can be enlightening and transformational. This workshop will be exploratory and generative.

Class size: minimum 5; maximum 12.

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Teaching artist: Shawna Kay Rodenberg is the author of Kin, a debut memoir deemed “essential reading” by the Washington Post and “gorgeously gritty” by Oprah Daily. She received an MFA from The Bennington Writing Seminars in 2012 and was an Alumni Fellow in 2022.  Her essays have appeared in Salon, The Village Voice, and Elle. In 2016, Shawna was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship, and in 2017 she was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award. A registered nurse, mother of five, and grandmother of two, she lives on a hobby goat farm in southern Indiana.