Authors: Shameka Cunningham, McKinley E. Melton, Adrienne Danyelle Oliver, Carmin Wong

Target Group: Older Adults, Elders

Goals

• Emphasize and explore themes: visual memory, imagination, interpretation, and storytelling
• Emphasize and explore form and elements of craft: epistolary form, poetic structure, and narrative (voice, perspective, sequencing)
• Participants will engage with personal history, draw connections between memory and imagination, and invite creative play as a tool for mental stimulation

Methodology:

• • Interactive workshop
  • Creative writing component
  • Optional performance element

Day One: Focus on memory and material (gathering and generating)

Day Two: Focus on creative production (emphasis on epistolary forms)

Background Pedagogical Resources for Facilitator

• Dominique Christina – “Blood in My Eye: The Poetics of Trauma and Memory” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 315-316)
• Frank X Walker – “Memory, Research, Imagination, and the Mining of Historical Poetry” (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 406-409)

Lesson Plan for Day One

Instructor plays lively, nostalgic music to set the mood.

Essential Questions

• How do we recover personal moments that were meaningful to us?
• How do our thoughts and emotions shape our memory of those moments?

Activities

Instructor uses a deck of playing cards to create partnerships among participants:

• Pairs are based on the number of each card (2, 3, Jack, Queen, etc.)
• Discussion topic is dictated by suit (Hearts, Spades, etc.)
  • Hearts – talk about your first/greatest love
  • Spades – talk about your first job
  • Clubs – talk about your most memorable fight or celebration
  • Diamonds – talk about the last gift you gave or received

Instructor asks reflection questions:

• What are some of the images that came to mind as you were telling your stories?
• What are some of the images that came to mind as you were listening to the stories of others?

Shift to a discussion of Jericho Brown’s “The Card Tables” (Furious Flower 2019, p. 33)

Open with excerpts from “Furious Flower presents Jericho Brown”

Instructor engages participants in a conversation about “imagery” that then transitions to “what is visual memory?”

Key Questions & Concepts

• Imagery: Using descriptive language or sensory details to invoke a specific image 
• Visual memory: Think about how memories come back to you in images

Key questions to ask/concepts to pursue:

• The poem begins with a commanding two-word sentence: “Stop playing.” How does this sentence reveal the speaker’s tone and attitude?
• What images are represented in the opening lines?
• How is the speaker’s memory represented in this poem?
• How does the speaker rely on questions to inform the reader of their past? How do questions present distance between the speaker and their personal history?
• How does the past help us think about our present identity?
• There are sexual or erotic elements represented in the poem (lines 1-5). How does the poet’s language force us to dig deeper to uncover these moments and consider different meanings of a line?

Lesson Plan for Day Two: Two-Hour Workshop

Instructor plays lively, nostalgic music to set the mood.

Essential Questions

• How do we use language to illustrate the past?
• How do we shape the language or our memories into form—crafting the epistolary?

Activity

• Visualization exercise: Who would you want to share a story with or imagine who you would want to write a letter or tell a story to?
• Share examples of epistolaries.

Poetry Discussion

Share examples of epistolaries

• “The Root” by Derrick Weston Brown (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 87-89)
•  “A Haiku Love Letter for Gabby Douglas” by Yalie Kamara (Furious Flower 2019, p. 53)
• “Brown to Browne :: Douglass to Tubman Remix” by F. Douglas Brown (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 173-174)

Reflection Questions

• What striking images do you remember from the poem?
• How do those images reflect yesterday’s definitions of imagery and visual memory?
• How do these poems reflect the elements of a letter?

—break—

Writing Time

Writing prompt: Using the work generated on Day One, begin crafting a letter to yourself or another person, place, or thing with which/whom you would like to have a dialogue. Include the images you recalled, modeling one of the following styles:

• “The Root” by Derrick Weston Brown (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 87-89)
• “A Haiku Love Letter for Gabby Douglas” by Yalie Kamara (Furious Flower 2019, p. 53)
• “Brown to Browne : : Douglass to Tubman Remix” by F. Douglas Brown (Furious Flower 2019, pp. 173-174)

Sharing Stories/Feedback