Are you interested in writing your or your family’s migration story?
In this workshop you will:
Explore personal and family archiving practices
Create an individual vision board from copies of personal and family documents, imaginative sketches and fragments of writing
Begin a longer-form writing project from the vision board, helped by prompts and fun communal activities
Leave with a sense of how you might expand your work
We welcome beginner and experienced writers alike. You do not already need to have a project in mind to join.
The workshops will take place at The Ruby, a gathering space and collective of Bay Area nonbinary, transfeminine, and woman-identified creatives.
The workshop will be co-run by local artists and Ruby members Rebeca Abidaíl Flores and Alexia Nader. This event is supported in part by Poets & Writers. Founded in 1970, Poets & Writers is the nation’s leading nonprofit organization serving creative writers.
About the Facilitators
Rebeca Abidaíl Flores is a Salvadoreña and Mexican American artist from Fresno, CA. She writes stories and makes large scale sculptures. Her creative fellowships include, the Latinx Teaching Artist Fellow at Root Division as well as the Teaching Artist at the University of San Francisco. She’s been an artist in residence at Story Knife, Laureate Lab Visual Wordist Studio with Juan Felipe Herrera. Literary work can be found in publications like El Tecolote, Your Impossible Voice, and The Acentos Review.
Alexia Nader is a writer from Miami, Florida. She is currently working on her first novel, a multigenerational story about the lives of three women in a Lebanese-Haitian-American family, and received a 2023-2024 Steinbeck Fellowship to support its completion. Her fiction has been published in Your Impossible Voice, her poetry in Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, and her criticism and journalism in Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, and The New Yorker, among other outlets. She teaches creative writing at Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and works for Writopia Labs, a nonprofit organization that provides creative writing workshops to children.
Health & Accessibility
This event is open only to vaccinated individuals providing proof of vaccination to be inclusive of our immunocompromised and caregiver members. Masking is highly encouraged. Joining this event requires walking up a set of stairs. Please let us know if we can help you up the stairs. Additionally, this event is aligned and dedicated to The Ruby’s mission of building community and safe spaces among people who identify as women, non-binary, and trans.
Cost
Feel free to drop in for one session, but we will be developing our works over the course of two sessions (8/17) and (8/24). This workshop will be offered at a sliding scale with a base materials fee of $10 to go toward printing and art supplies for our vision boards. Please give what you can. We work to continue to have workshops be as accessible as possible. All proceeds to support the artists and The Ruby.
Ticket: $20-$40 for one workshop, $30-$70 for both workshops
Ruby member price: $15 for one workshop, $25 for both workshops