90-min WORKSHOP: Turning Ancestral Research into Personal Narrative

A 90-MINUTE WORKSHOP TO GUIDE YOU IN CARVING YOUR OWN STORIES AND MEANING MAKING FROM ANCESTRAL DOCUMENTS, OBJECTS, AND TALL TALES.

WHEN: Anytime and Forever.

This class was recorded at the London Writers' Salon on August 24, 2023.

PRICE: $42

WHO IT'S FOR: If you collect letters and old photographs in family albums, or you want to be that person. If you're obsessed with a particular ancestor, or you want to be. If you wonder about your origins but have no idea where to start. If you have so many questions about your family ancestry, you don't know how to make sense of them all. If you've thought about a family story you could tell but haven't been able to start. If you want to find a through-line for your story in all the stories you've heard about your ancestral past.

ABOUT ME: I'm a peacock-follower. If I find a curiosity, it'll be a long time before I stop chasing it. I love to teach and support other impossibly curious writers who wonder about the pieces that made them who they are.

In this 90-minute workshop, you'll learn how to build stories from letters, photographs, public records, doctors’ prescriptions, and dating profiles. Excerpts from writing by Audre Lorde, E.J. Koh, Elissa Washuta, and others serve as examples of how to combine primary sources with craft and form, all in service to the nuances of your life.

• ​Clearly define your most important question(s)
• Understand whose story you want to write
• ​Learn craft elements for research-based writing
• ​New writing generated from prompts 
• New resources to find pieces you're missing
• A list of writer heroes to emulate
• Sample essays to read
• Extra prompts to take with you
• Lifetime access to the materials and recording

Bring any ancestral research, object, or story you want to work with, as well as a long list of whom you want to write about and why.

FIVE REASONS (OF MANY) YOU'LL BE GLAD YOU DID THIS WORK

1. Connection. Insert grand statement about the ways technology and the modern world have us feeling disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the past. Given all that, this class sprouted from my deeply-held and life-long desire to sniff out my origins and histories. Even if you're a little curious, the connection you'll feel and make of details in your life may provide a renewed sense of comfort and curiosity about yourself and the world around you.
2. Clarity. Finding the details you want can be a needle-haystack situation. Making sense and teasing out the questions you have about the past can be overwhelming. Even if the facts remain ambiguous, your approach and interest in them will come through a little clearer with just an hour's focus.
3. Sense of self, nbd. Doing this work was a gift I gave myself. Knowing more about my roots and making personal choices about what cultural traditions to keep alive and which don't work for me is wildly empowering. No one can tell me who or what I am as a result of the work I've done, and I hope you'll get that gift for yourself, too. <3
4. Support. No doubt about it: This work is hard. It's personal, it's messy, it's unstructured and entirely unique to you. This class is a way to do the research and writing while knowing there's a huge community of others doing it, too. Plus you get guidance from someone (me) who's done my own version of this deep dive.
5. Discovery. The writing of it all brought me revelatory perspective on myself, my history, my family. By studying craft while researching my past, I discovered parallels that really surprised me and excited me about the world and the echoes in our lives. My hope and intention is to guide you to your own surprises and delights.

WHO THIS CLASS IS FOR:

• This class is for those sitting on piles of family documents and photos and journals and objects and are completely overwhelmed about what to do with all of it and what sense to make of it.
• This class is for those who have a distant relationship to their family for any number of reasons and want so much to understand themselves better in the context of that distance.
• This class is for witches and mediums and weirdos who believe that the ancestral past is alive and well in their present and every day lives.
• This class is for the endlessly curious and hungry to understand for themselves the ways collective history defines the individual, and how the individual can live in service to the collective future.

WHO THIS CLASS IS NOT FOR:

This isn't a research class, and I'm not a professional researcher. I'm a curious writer who has used the wisdom of librarians and guides to help me through the hairy parts of my journey, which has taken me to Eastern Europe and back. The class is less about finding more facts to use, than it is about how to make sense of what you already know, how to build on what you have, and offer some steps in how to discover more.

TESTIMONIALS

Katie is such a thoughtful and generous instructor. Her classes are full of well-designed exercises and rich research. Ancestral writing can be like wading into a swamp, but here, you don't have to go it alone. In a space that is both trauma-informed and risk-taking, we can access larger cultural conversations about writing history, family, lineage. I appreciate all her encouragement, wisdom, and community-knowledge-power! -- Celeste Chan, 2023-2024 Hugo House Fellow

In a way, memory can be as interpreted like fiction, but feel as personally static as fact. Katie guides us to uncover our personal histories through conventional approaches--oral interviews and research of archival documents--to exercises and modalities that uplift and honor how our built identities, family narratives, and right to be "a storyteller" are fundamental to ancestral history. As a new writer, this class was both challenging and empowering, but I felt especially supported through Katie's instruction, the class organization, and the curated readings from BIPOC and femme authors. -- Dimitri Groce, MSW

Katie is a warm and wise instructor who guides writers through a process of intergenerational research and healing. With Katie's guidance, we gave voice to ancestral joys and traumas and learned new formal processes for both marrying research and imagination. Katie curates a diverse and illuminating syllabus, and steers her courses with grace and expertise. You will come away from her class a better writer, thinker, and human. -- Catherine Carberry

I would absolutely take this course again. Thank you for your generosity of spirit, your insightful curriculum, and for creating a beautiful space for writers and thinkers. I just wish we had more time together to keep exploring and learning from each other and you! -- past student

WHO IS TEACHING THIS CLASS

Katie Lee Ellison is a writer, a teacher, and a curator and host. She writes the newsletter, A Beautiful Fad. She's been teaching online classes since 2016 on her own platforms as well as for Hugo House, Imprint Books, London Writers Salon, and elsewhere. She's published essays on the most personal subjects, very especially about ancestry and family dynamics, and is a huge champion of others who want to do the same.

She is not a therapist, mental health professional, trauma-informed facilitator, or any other credentialed human who could take on the depths that may arise from this work. She is a Scorpio moon and loves to go deep alone and in company, and is a great guide and companion for others who also like that or who don't go often.