In North By Current, we encounter a teacher in the form of a child’s voice. This child’s wisdom leads us to consider the way that: “Memory must be created against an abundance of information. But also against an absence. It has to be constructed. You assemble the fractures, arrange the incidents, to build a story.” For every story we choose to tell there are hundreds that we don’t, and the ties that connect our past and the future selves are entanglements of narratives that give texture and meaning to our lives. Creative writing is one approach to tapping into memory and imagination as sibling forces in processes of meaning-making and storytelling. This work allows writers to put pieces of a past together towards a future vision of possibility.

In this lesson students will engage in “memory work” through practices of creative writing and revision. They will move through stages of the writing process, understand key components of the craft, study models of literature that serve as examples of these genres, and support one another through collaborative revision processes that encourage re-vision, trust, and confidence in their own voices and narrative points of view.