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Our Beginnings

“Where would you like a Stranger-Reader to meet you, if you had to choose any imaginary ‘page one moment’ to help that person to walk in your shoes?” Novelist and essayist Erika Duncan posed this question in March 1996 to a group of women with little to no creative writing experience. 

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As the culmination of a conference celebrating women breaking silences that she had co-organized in Southampton, NY, Erika had offered a week of free memoir-writing workshops open to any woman who wanted to write her story. Although she had years of experience teaching writing, she feared she had opened Pandora’s Box with this workshop series, which called on participants to share their stories—including potentially the most difficult or intimate moments of their lives—with a group of strangers they would perhaps never see again. 

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Two days into the workshop she realized that she had discovered a new way to teach memoir—one with both healing and community-building aspects. She had also stumbled upon the cornerstone of Herstory’s approach—creating empathy in a Stranger-Reader from the very first scene, or “page one moment.” 

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Soon women of different generations and from diverse backgrounds were traveling long distances to attend Herstory’s first and, at the time, only workshop, which took place for more than a decade at the Southampton Cultural Center. By 1999, a counseling center in an underserved area in West Babylon, NY had invited Erika to start a workshop there, and by 2006 she was also delivering workshops at a retirement community in South Setauket. In just a few years, Herstory workshops had become spaces where survivors of domestic violence, incest, poverty, and war were writing alongside women sharing stories of immigrating to a new country, falling in love, giving birth, or losing a loved one. Erika’s 1996 “experiment” had evolved into a project that cut across race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, age, and socioeconomic background.   

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As workshops proliferated across Long Island, Erika decided to teach others Herstory’s unique empathy-centered pedagogy so that even more people could have the opportunity to write and share their memoirs. Women who were beginning to make Herstory a way of life began training with Erika in 2004 to learn how to facilitate workshops using the Herstory method. Responding to Long Island’s rapidly changing demographics and to the desire to include voices from as many marginalized sectors as possible, Herstory established memoir writing programs for Latinas and incarcerated women that same year. 

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By 2010 Herstory was offering numerous workshops in schools, universities, and community organizations across Long Island. Herstory programming now included people of all genders in addition to women and girls. 

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Erika’s simple dare many years earlier to transform one’s most personal story into a work of art capable of touching the heart of a stranger launched the creation of an international, ever-expanding network of guided memoir-writing workshops—Herstory Writers Network.

 

To read more about our beginnings and the roots of Herstory’s methodology, please see the introduction to Paper Stranger: Shaping Stories In Community, our Herstory pedagogy “textbook” that forms the basis of our facilitator training program. 

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Herstory Writers Network

2539 Middle Country Road

Second Floor

Centereach, NY 11720

Phone: 631-676-7395

Email: contactus@herstorywriters.org

© 2024 by Herstory Writers Network. Reproduction of any materials presented on this site is prohibited.

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