Tag Archives: Anthony Calypso

A Flash of Memory

In January of last year I began a nonfiction-writing residency at a  high school, here in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn.  At an early point during the residency as a teaching artist, I asked my students to explore a memory.  What I meant essentially, when I asked for an exploration, when I asked the students to use or employ their memories, a flash of a memory, a blink or spark from the corridors behind their collective eyes, was supposed to be rather simple.  Pick or choose a moment within an event and use that moment like a flash card.  Put that moment to work as a piece of a scaffold or, as a bone  in the structure of a larger narrative.

From the onset of the residency, my goal was to have the students produce a collection of nonfiction pieces for our year-end anthology.  The idea was to transform a memory from a fact or group of facts into a central thread in a narrative.  I gave them an example, from my own days in high school, from an exceptionally different or perhaps foreign landscape.

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