Workshop: Legacy Stories

Legacy Stories: Writing Beside Your Ancestors with Truth, Beauty, Research, and Intrigue, led by Christian Winn. This workshop is part of the 2025 To Taste Life Twice Seminar. 

In this workshop writers will dive forward into the past, learning how to best tell remarkable and widely engaging stories of intriguing characters and events from their family's histories. From your teetotalling suffragist great grandmother who stumped for Prohibition, to your hit man second Cousin, to your father the long-suffering romance novelist, we will take on the best stories we know from those who've come before us and helped shape who we are and how we better understand the world through the stories they lived that we're bringing to the page.

We will be exploring and digging into quality research methods and techniques, character building, creating compelling story arc and voice, integrating a point of view that integrates the writer's present self with the stories of the past, and more. 

Workshop writers will be asked to read a small selection of model-text memoir excerpts, personal essays, and short family histories before the workshop, so that we can study and explore how well-published writers have successfully approached writing stories of their own family's pasts, and their place in this history. As well, writers will be asked to come to this workshop with an ancestral story - or stories - they'd love to take on, or have already begun to write and engage with.