The HISB/Herstory Partnership

Since 2018 the Humanities Institute at Stony Brook University has partnered with Herstory Writers Network  (formerly Herstory Writers Workshop) to create intergenerational memoir writing circles where students can write side by side with community members in a shared effort to use their personal experiences to change their worlds.  Through three key programs, together we work at the intersection of art, healing, and action, in person and remotely, as our themes and formats change over the years.

Through the Adrián Pérez Memorial Internship Program, 40 to 60 students participate in an ever-shifting array of credit-bearing themed “Online Workshops for Our Time.” Each semester we highlight different opportunities. We invite you to join a 12-week campus/community workshop with the goal of generating stories that will advance the movement for equity, inclusion and justice at this time when every one of our voices is needed to protect our most basic human rights.

We invite you to start your writing journey in any of the themed online workshops described below. Student participants may earn up to 3 credits and fulfill EXP+. For more information about earning course credits, contact susan.scheckel@stonybrook.edu.

Opportunities for the Spring 2025 semester include:

Testify: Memoir as a Tool for Action
Thursdays 6:30-8:30 pm Eastern Time via ZOOM

This workshop provides a hands-on exploration of how guided memoir writing can be used as a tool for societal change. Interns will be writing and working side by side with other students and community members to explore how individual experiences relate to larger social and political issues and how finding one’s voice and telling one’s story can produce empowerment and contribute to the process of change. Through this process, interns will hone their writing and communication skills, strengthen their skills in active listening and constructive feedback, and acquire fresh insights into the power of storytelling and community building.

Making Our Voices Heard: Memoirs to (Re)Imagine Mental Healthcare
Wednesdays 4:30-6:30 pm Eastern Time via ZOOM

This workshop invites people who have been affected by the mental healthcare system, who may identify as mad, psychiatric survivors, psychiatric consumers, or neurodivergent, to write their memoir in a mad-affirming, human rights-driven, supportive environment. In this workshop, we will combat stigma and discrimination through the power of storytelling to change hearts, minds, and policies. We invite you to join us to use the power of your voice to (re)shape our mental healthcare system and (re)imagine care.

Space is limited.  Go to www.herstorywriters.org for more information about these workshops.

The Humanities Institute at Stony Brook and Herstory Writers Network also collaborate on special multi-year projects, including Writing Beyond the Prison, Herstory’s yearly Freedom Forum in Wyandanch, and Storytelling and The Law, in collaboration with the Touro Law Center and Judge Fernando’s Concept Court in Central Islip.

Through a series of fellowships and opportunities for selected graduates of our internship program, we collaborate with Herstory’s Amy Maiello Hagedorn Training Institute to ensure that both traditional and nontraditional students are able to extend their work with the Herstory project in the schools, in the carceral justice arena, and in the larger community.

In the words of Susan Scheckel, Associate Professor in English at SBU and HISB Advisory Board member, “Watching the workshop from the perspective of someone who has spent my professional life trying to convince often skeptical students of the power and pleasures of writing, I was astonished by how quickly these students became serious and skilled writers....The students approached writing in a new way: with a sense of urgency and commitment. They became part of a true writing community united by a sense of common purpose and faith in the power of stories to bring about change. By the end of the semester, the students had grown as writers and as human beings skilled in the art of deep listening and attentive to the value of each individual’s unique experience. Over and over again in the final course evaluations, students wrote that this was one of the most meaningful experiences of their college careers.” Read more

 

Herstory Writing Network Founder and Artistic Director novelist and essayist Erika Duncan, has devoted her life to giving voice to stories that have been silenced and unsung. Her novels and portraits of writers, artists, and pathfinders in the humanities and science, all touch on the moment that a spark was discovered, and were featured in her front page “Encounters” series in the New York Times Long Island Weekly, which appeared monthly for four years.