Instructor: Amanda Lacson
Maximum Enrollment: 10
Class Term: 07/26/2025 - 08/16/2025
Tuition/Fees
SCN Member: $125
Non-Member: $165
Class synopsis
Your family history is alive. It is the backbone of your personal history; it’s what you will pass on to future generations. The photographs, heirloom objects and stories that make up your family archive should not just collect dust in boxes. In this class, you will use journaling, memoir, embodied writing and research to take stock of your family archive and look at ways to bring your family history to life, present and relevant today.Class description
In this class, we will meet for 2-hour sessions via Zoom on Saturday afternoons from 1 PM – 3 PM ET. Each session will be guided by the material of the week: I will share background and generative writing prompts based on the material. Live participants will have the option to share their work during the Zoom class. If you are unable to make the live Zoom sessions, the prompts will also be sent via email, along with additional resources and prompts that are optional to complete.
Class goals
To bring your family history and archive to life, to deepen your family stories, to see your family story in the context of cultural history, to gain an understanding of how your family history and archive interacts with the world
Class communication method
Class will be delivered via live Zoom and email.Class outline
Week 1: Inventory your Archive
This week you will inventory the objects and stories that make up your family archive. Through journal writing and personal reflection prompts, you will hone in on the objects and/or stories that feel most alive at this time, which we will focus on for the rest of the class.
Week 2: Activating your Archive
In this week, we will look at the most potent objects and stories of your archive. Through memoir and personal essay writing prompts, we will dive deeper into the stories behind the objects and the stories of your archive. We will look at examples from memoir and photography essays that tell deeper stories through single deep dives to creative juxtapositions to collage forms.
Week 3: Your Family and the World
Family history doesn’t happen in a vacuum. This week we will use journal writing techniques to examine how to consider our family history in relation to the social, cultural, and historical context at the time. We will learn how to form research questions to investigate our family history in a way that brings the past close up and present.
Week 4: Speaking to the Family and Ancestors
This week we will go over techniques in oral history interviewing and embodied writing that will elicit interesting and connected family histories. Building on the work from the previous classes, we will identify family members to interview and/or ancestors to “speak to” and create a plan to do so. We will look at examples of embodied family histories that bring the reader closer to the ancestors’ experience.
Class time commitment
2 hour live Zoom sessions in which we will read examples and spend time writing and sharing work. I will also give exercises and examples for you to work with throughout the week, but these are entirely optional.Instructor bio
Amanda Faye Lacson, MA-TLA is a first-generation Filipina-American writer, photographer, historian and teaching artist. Amanda is deeply curious about intersections of identity, family, and cultural history, a thread that runs through all her work. She is a former board member of the Transformative Language Arts Network (TLAN), and continues to teach the required classes for TLAN Certification including Changing the World with Words: Foundations in Transformative Language Arts, and Foundations in Facilitation (which she also co-designed). Amanda founded FamilyArchive Business which she ran for ten years, helping clients record and preserve their stories and archives. She is a founding member of Biographers Guild of Greater New York, a membership organization for local personal historians.
