Restoryation: Writing Your Origin Story

We, as humans, are more than our birth certificates and where we work. We, as writers, are more than our rationalizations. As both humans and writers, we are all at once artists, dreamers, mythmakers, and visionaries. In this workshop, we will explore the cultural history and importance of origin stories, as well as ideas for approaching and discovering your own.

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The purpose of this workshop is to encourage students to rethink, rediscover, and reclaim their origin stories (“restoryation”) through ethnoautobiography per the work of Dr. Leny Strobel and Dr. Jürgen Werner Kremer. 

Ethnoautobiography is “defined as creative writing (and/or oral presentation) that grounds itself in the ethnic, cultural, historical, ecological, and gender self-exploration of the author.” It is a resistance poetics and a practice in re-membering and re-calling of our “long body.” It is a method of decolonization, reclamation and cultural revalidation. As such, origin stories are sacred stories; they are the key to the healing of the Earth. 

The instructor leads students through a series of questions, moving from the basic of demographics to the more abstract and personal, that will lead each to a new understanding of their own past. Other activities, such as plant spirit communication and writing exercises encourage thinking about relationships as origin story, contrasting the Western viewpoint with the Eastern viewpoint (specifically, indigenous Filipino practices). Other influences include Audre Lorde and David Abram.