A MemoryWorks Masterclass with Q.M. Zhang
Have you been searching for your history, only to find the stories you've been told are not true, and parts have been left out or erased? What tools do you need to excavate a past that has gone underground? What will you make out of the remains you unearth?
This workshop will introduce participants to the creative practice of memory work. Akin to what Toni Morrison called “literary archeology,” Memory Work involves both research and imagination: “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork, you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply” (The Site of Memory).
Q.M. Zhang will introduce you to some of the creative tools and practices that emerged in the making of her award-winning, hybrid book, Accomplice to Memory (Kaya Press, 2017). You will consider what it means to be a next generation writer: How to harness the urgency of the present as you journey to sites of your past. How to conduct yourself like a person digging. You will turn over soil, gather fragments and traces you find there, and use these materials for your experiments with hybrid forms of writing.
Where: Online via Zoom
Date: March 11, 2026
Time: 19:00-21:00 CEST
Masterclass Fees: CHF 30 (Members) | CHF 45 (Non-Members)
Q.M. Zhang is a writer, teacher, and founder of Q.M. Zhang | MemoryWorks, a creative research & writing practice for individuals and communities who are trying reclaim histories that have been censored, silenced, or erased. This practice grew out of three decades of teaching on the borders of social science and creative writing, and the making of her award-winning hybrid book, Accomplice to Memory (Kaya Press, 2017), which combines memoir, fiction, and documentary photographs to explore intergenerational silences and omissions in her own immigrant family history.
In 2020, Zhang left academia to devote herself to the practice of memory work in the world. She launched MemoryWorks as a collective space for those she calls next gen writers: children of migrants & refugees, descendants of Indigenous & enslaved people, offspring of settlers & slavers—all who write in order to understand their proximity to history. As a creative practice, memory work draws on a myriad of sources: images and objects, documents and dreams, maps and myths, conversations and hallucinations, policy and propaganda, the real and the imagined and the possible. At the core of this practice are hybrid tools and forms for writing into the cracks between what we’ve been taught to remember, what’s been distorted or disappeared, and what we have to imagine to get closer to truth.
Q.M. Zhang is Associate Professor Emerita of Cultural Psychology & Creative Nonfiction at Hampshire College and an Advisory Editor to The Massachusetts Review.
