So often we're urged to "write what you know" – but what happens when there are gaps in your memories, absences in family history, or disputes about what really happened? In this open-genre generative workshop, we'll practice approaches to writing beyond what you remember and into what you don’t or can't know. We’ll explore ways to research your own life and add details that enrich your memories, and we’ll also use what essayist Lisa Knott calls “perhapsing” to speculate about those parts of our histories that we can never really know.

Nancy Reddy is the author of the poetry collections Pocket Universe and Double Jinx and co-editor of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. Her first book of narrative nonfiction, The Good Mother Myth, is forthcoming with St. Martin’s Press. Her essays have appeared in Slate, Poets & Writers, Romper, The Millions, and elsewhere. The recipient of grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University. She writes the newsletter Write More, Be Less Careful.