teaching
Your Memory is Fiction (a multisensory archive)
This workshop series is a continued exploration of memory as an imagined, contested, and embodied playground. Over the course of six weeks, we will build a memory palace, probe its foundations, scrutinise its appearances, rummage through the cellar, and decorate the dance parlour. Approaching memory as a multisensory archive, we will ask how trauma affects remembering and how we can sustain memory palaces in exile. Most importantly, we’ll decide which memories we need to break up with and which can help fertilise our garden. Each week, I invite you to engage with a reading/video/podcast before we convene online for collective, thematic free writes. You do not need to be a writer to participate, and you can write in your language of choice.
This workshop was held in February and March 2024.
Your Memory Is Fiction: A Truth Telling Workshop for Black women writers | 4-Week Workshop
As a Black woman writer, you carry within you a living archive. Your Memory Is Fiction: A Truth Telling Workshop for Black Women Writers aims to help you breathe words into it. We will explore nostalgia, linearity vs. memory as patchwork, and auto-fiction as an accessible genre for Black writers and Black history making. Whether you write prose or poetry, we’ll investigate the creative process of accessing our memories and writing them into a narrative. While we shape these memories into fiction, we’ll extract personal and collective truths that may resonate wholeheartedly, save us, and free us. You can bring a project in need of expansion, and/or a blank page, to let memories guide you into a story.
This workshop ran on Saturdays, March 9-30 2024.
Your Memory is Fiction (a Truth Telling Workshop)
This workshop series explores the wondrousness, the mystery, the banality, and the brutality of memory. We ask ‘how do things happen?’, to investigate remembering as a literary, political, and liberatory act. Immersing ourselves into storytelling and language, we will let authors guide us on our quest to find out how we remember and why we remember. In six sessions, traversing the past, the present, and writing possible futures, we will approach memory as emotion, myth as truth, and spiritual companionship as sanity. Each week, I invite you to engage with a reading before we convene online for collective, thematic free writes. You do not need to be a writer to participate, and you can write in your (any) language of choice.
This workshop ran in August and September 2023.
I invite you to creatively cultivate tools for strategic optimism (despite the pain of existence). Through writing exercises and literature-led discussion, we will draw inspiration from feminist authors and each other. In three two-hour long sessions throughout January, we will write foundations to build supportive communities through words. We will learn and grow from grief, and practice embracing abundance wholly and fully. Each week, I send you readings before we convene online for collective, thematic free writes. You do not need to be a writer to participate, and you can write in your (any) language of choice.
This workshop ran from January 15-30 2023.
Feminist Studies
I facilitated a Feminist Studies Programme through discussion based learning at the Cairo Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the academic year of 2021/2022: The first semester lays the foundations through three tracks; the historical, anthropological/ sociological, and literary/ philosophical. The the second semester offers specialised thematic courses for participants to expand their knowledge and develop their own practice in line with their personal and professional interests. Course topics include: Intimate Archives; The Historical Anthropology of Healing; Critical Studies of the Image; Politics and Public Feelings; Phenomenology; Space Lab; Writing Lab; Translation Lab; Pedagogy Lab; Contemporary Women’s Issues; Pleasure Activism & Body Literacy.
Ethnographic Study (Autumn 2021)
This course imagines feminist worlds through studying feminist anthropology and examining strategies, faults and possibilities to claim each other across language and cultural distinction. Centering our bodies as lived sights of experience, we trace how gender intersects with participation in and power over creating knowledge. Collectively, we assemble our own toolboxes for imagining feminist futures and embodying feminist realities. Learning from artists and anthropologists, this course travels across the globe to map narratives of abundance, solidarity and self-reflection. We recognise the universality of subjective emotion as our common ground and explore what it means to love, thrive, govern, and wonder.
Find the syllabus here.
Reading Feminism/ Writing To Live (Spring 2022)
Reading Feminism/Writing To Live explores language, rhythm and imagination. It is both a Creative Writing lab and a close-reading course. We indulge in the words of novelists and poets, to conjure up energy and courage for our own writing endeavours. What do stories tell us about the state of the world? Maybe more importantly: can we survive, even alter, this state through writing words? In this course, we hone our appreciation of aesthetics, both through creating and consuming, consulting and advising (ourselves and each other). In writing poetry and prose, we imagine past and future, unravel taboo and power, and sometimes craft an escape through a fantastical feminist gate. The weekly readings serve as prompts which we will interrogate in class through creative writing exercises.
If your brain was a place, what would it look like? If your ancestor gave you life advice, what would they say? Do you dare to put your every word on trial for its life, can you bear to pull out your tongue and read yourself against the silence? I invite you to adventure into dystopia, utopia, love, and hope by creating words and watching them become worlds.
Find the syllabus here.
This class created High Priestess in Low Tides, a zine with writings from the sessions, published by Kandaka. Find the zine here.
AMUNA WAGNER 