The Language of Memory

an online workshop on writing memoir

with Carmen Bugan

Date: Friday May 27, 19h CET (Zurich/Paris)  via Zoom

In Greek mythology, memory is the goddess Mnemosyne, daughter of heaven and earth, and the mother of the nine muses. No wonder we’re fascinated with it! Memory brings in conversation the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, it transports us back and forth in time, it restores to us the clearest images of childhood when we are getting older. 

Nothing is more inspiring than looking back and reflecting on memories when we write our life stories. Those recurrent, insistent memories are the blocks of personal identity, and, in a memoir, they function as story signposts. So, does memory have a specific language, and what is “the language of memory”?

In this workshop, we will look at several writers who produced iconic pieces of literature based on memory. Among them are Vladimir Nabokov, Seamus Heaney, Eva Hoffman, and Isabel Allende. The participants will write about their own memories with the help of guided exercises.  It hoped the mother of the muses will pay us a visit and inspire us to find a fertile writing path.

About Carmen

Dr. Carmen Bugan, George Orwell Prize Fellow, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Lilies from America: New and Selected Poems (a PBS Special Commendation), a memoir, Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week), and a monograph on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile. Her most recent books are Poetry and the Language of Oppression: Essays on Politics and Poetics (Oxford University Press), and Time Being, out now. She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford, and currently teaches at the Gotham Writers' Workshop in Manhattan.

Please register on the GWG website, or contact

genevawriters@gmail.com

Zoom details TBA