Our lives are populated with inanimate objects. Whether immense or minuscule, utilitarian or decorative, treasure or trash, each and every object around us has a story to tell and mysteries to reveal. Through a variety of perspective-shifting writing prompts, this workshop invites us to examine the quotidian and come to regard the often disregarded stuff of our lives with fresh appreciation.

Ann de Forest's writing, as well as her practice as a walking artist, centers on the resonance of place. Her short stories, essays, and poetry have appeared in Gyroscope Review, Cleaver Magazine, Unbroken, The Journal, Hotel Amerika, and PIF, and in Hidden City Daily, where she’s a contributing writer. Ann has documented stories of displacement for Al Bustan: Seeds of Culture, examined the bonds that develop between home health care providers and their patients in the book Healing on the Homefront, and has walked the entire perimeter of Philadelphia with three other artists, initiating an ongoing collaboration to open up new conversations about margins and edges, the power of slow creative practice, and art as collective witness. She is the editor of Ways of Walking (New Door Books, 2022).