Back to All Events

Writing (and Researching) the Unknowable, A Two-Part Class with Megan Culhane Galbraith

2 Sessions, Thursdays, September 12th- September 19th,

6 pm - 7:30 pm EST

online, $200

Enroll for this class.

Whether you’re writing memoir, essays, narrative nonfiction, or hybrid work, you’ll run into research dead ends, gaps in memory, and unreliable narrators. How do we write convincingly and factually about what we can’t or don’t know? How do we establish authority for our readers? How do we identify important silences, listen into them, and reconstruct those voices? I’ll use examples from Saidiya Hartman and Maria Stepanova, among others. We’ll do a close read of “The Hottest Water in Chicago,” by Gayle Pemberton. Bring your curiosity and wonder.

In the second part of this class we’ll investigate research tips and techniques that are helpful when we butt up against dead ends. We’ll look at how to write around and into silences. I’ll give plenty of examples and we may do an exercise or two so please bring a photograph that is meaningful to you that you know little about. For a portion of the class we’ll be joined by Oceana Wilson, Director of the Library at Bennington College, and we’ll walk through how to do research in libraries and archives. We’ll leave a hearty amount of time for Q&A and you’ll leave with a resource sheet and tips you can take to your local library or archive.

Enroll in this class.

About the instructor

Megan Culhane Galbraith is a writer, visual artist, and adoptee. Her debut memoir-in-essays is The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child's Memory Book(Mad Creek Books/Ohio State University Press, 2021.) Megan's work was listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2021 and 2017 and she was recognized by Poets & Writers in their "5 Over 50" issue.She was the 2022 Writer-in-Residence at Adoptees ON. Her essays, interviews, reviews, and visual art have appeared in BOMB, The Believer, HYPERALLERGIC!, ZZYZYVA, Tupelo Quarterly, Longreads, Hotel Amerika, and Catapult, among others. She was the founding director of the GIV Young Writers Institute, and is the Director of the Bennington Writing Seminars.www.megangalbraith.com

Previous
Previous
September 10

We Are Each Other’s Business: An Intermediate Level Poetry Workshop, 6 sessions with Natasha Oladokun

Next
Next
September 14

We All Have Family Stories to Tell, 3 sessions with Eraldo Souza dos Santos