Making & Memoir: Storytelling through Fibers 1M23
Making and Memoir is a two-day workshop intensive that stitches together personal writing with handcraft techniques.
The workshop centers calm and balance in the writing process by turning to textile-based exercises to facilitate self-expression, generate writing ideas and cut through writer’s block.
Participants will learn the benefits of repetition in craftwork as an ideation and “rest” technique in the midst of drafting, writing and editing a submission to The New York Times’ “Tiny Love Stories.”
By the end of the workshop, participants will have a complete, 100-word mini-memoir they may submit to The New York Times for consideration. They'll feel confident creating Yorkshire buttons, Suffolk puffs, and peace patches, as well as upcycled weaving and friendship bracelets. Students will be well-versed in how to lean into a repetitive making process that facilitates the writing journey.
This workshop is for people ages 16+ of all craft abilities. A craft kit for each student will be available at the start of the workshop for $25, payable to the instructor.
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Hinda Mandell
Hinda Mandell, Ph.D., is professor in the School of Communication at RIT in New York, where she is the director of the university’s journalism program. Mandell is editor of Crafting Dissent: Handicraft as Protest from the American Revolution to the Pussyhats (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); co-curator and co-editor of Crafting Democracy: Fiber Arts and Activism (RIT Press, 2019); a co-editor of Nasty Women and Bad Hombres: Gender and Race in the 2016 US Presidential Election (University of Rochester Press, 2018); the author of Sex Scandals, Gender and Power in Contemporary American Politics (Praeger, 2017); and co-editor of Scandal in a Digital Age (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). As a journalist, her work has been published in Politico, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The LA Times, among other publications. Her scholarly inquiries into collaborative handcraft as change-agents have been published in Craft Research, the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, and forthcoming in the Journal of Feminist Scholarship. She is on the international advisory board of the Journal of Craft & Communities, and her research has been funded by the Center for Craft and Fiber Art Now. In 2020 she was a guest artist with Visual Studies Workshop, whose residency funded the production of her artist book, “The Yarn Must Live: A Polemic on a Pandemic and Public Art,” which was acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2021. Since 2017, she has organized maker interventions on issues of social reform tied to geographic place reaching 2,000 craft participants. She is on Instagram: @crochetactivism.
Website:
Specialty:
art activism, fibers
Materials to bring to class:
A kit including all supplies will be provided by the instructor, for a fee of $25.