Larchmont Library to Offer 6-Week Writing Seminar

“The Places We Come From: The Stories We Tell” will be a reading, discussion and writing seminar that raises questions about how the worlds that we come from – place and time, history and memory, family and culture – shape our own identities and the stories we tell about ourselves and others. The seminar promises to engage the participants in “reading as writer”. To read as a writer is to “experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words.” Participants will keep a writer’s notebook for their own experiments with reading and writing a variety of texts.

Tuesdays at 4:00pm, October 18, 25, November 1, 15, 22, 29 and December 6. The theme for the 2016 NY Council for the Humanities Grant ties into the 125th anniversary celebration of Larchmont.

The scholar/facilitator will be Judith Pearl Summerfield, Professor Emerita of English, at Queens College, The City University of New York. Summerfield, a long-time Larchmont resident, is a scholar/teacher of literature, composition, rhetoric, and narrative studies. (In 1998, she was named New York State Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation.) Her new book, A Man Comes from Someplace: Stories, History, Memory from a Lost Time will serve as the springboard for the seminar. This program is made possible by a grant from the New York Council for the Humanities.

Summerfield draws from many sources: interviews with an oral storyteller (the author’s father), family letters, papers from immigration and relief organizations of the 1920s, eyewitness reports, newspaper clippings, photographs, maps, genealogy, and cultural/historical research. (The author’s father who escaped Ukraine during the Russian Revolution settled in southwestern Pennsylvania and spent his final years in Larchmont.)

The book investigates the ways family stories can be collected, interpreted, and represented to situate story in history and to re-envision connections between the past, present, and future. The participants will be encouraged to explore their own “artifacts” of the places they come from, drawing from stories, history, and memory, photographs, maps, genealogy, and what anthropologists call “objects of ethnography” such as recipes, music, books, heirlooms, food, festivals, and other family rituals.

There will be six sessions, with a reception where participants read selections from their own stories. Summerfield’s book, A Man Comes from Someplace, will be read and discussed in the seminar, as it raises questions about the purposes and forms of narratives. There will also be additional readings of and about narrative, including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and various writings on the nature of narrative.