Posted on 17, Jun 2011
Picture This
Picture this; you have old family photos at home lying in albums and/or dusty boxes. You may not recognize the people, the places, the times, the clothes, the hairdos, but you know there is a story waiting to be told. Come be a Nepali armed with photos and words, come tell these stories. Join Nepal Picture Library to dig up, contextualize and archive your old photographs and remind us that we have more than just one history, more than just one story to tell. Nepal Picture Library believes that history begins at home and hopes to unearth and collect stories from our personal histories, that will en mass shape our collective memory.
In this three-day writing workshop, you will go through your dusty albums and pick out three photos. With the help of your family members’ or your own memories, you will creatively respond to the chosen images. Facilitators will guide you in telling, writing and performing the stories behind each photograph in the manner that the image demands. You will be asked to do exercises that address craft issues of storytelling such as voice and style, and also carry a high level of discussion based around constructively critiquing your fellow participants’ work.
Photos and written texts produced in the workshop will be celebrated in the form of a digital presentation and reading. Venue TBA. Works will also be uploaded onto the photo.circle website and be a part of a larger national digital archive used for research, socio-historic mapping and preservation purposes.
FACILITATORS
AJIT BARAL is a publisher, bookseller and some-time writer. He has co-edited an anthology of Nepali short stories in English, New Nepal, New Voices and published two books: Interviews Across Time and Space andThe Lazy Conman and Other Stories: Folktales from Nepal. Until recently, he was with Nagarik where he used to coordinate the first stand-alone literary supplement in Nepal, Akshar. His writings have also appeared in national journals, international magazines and other book forms.
GAURAV MONGA teaches Literature and writing at schools and writes a little as well. He recently published a story in the Literary journal: Danse Macabre and has forthcoming work in the journals: Birkensnake and Zero Ducats. He currently resides in Lalitpur, Nepal but hails from New Delhi, India.
MUNA GURUNG is working on a large writing project, which keeps getting smaller. Her stories explore ideas of “girlfriendhood,” living in the peripheries of love, and food, lots of food. She is currently an MFA candidate in fiction and an Undergraduate Writing Program instructor at Columbia University. She is from Kathmandu, Nepal.
PRAWIN ADHIKARI writes and translates fiction, creative non-fiction, and writes screenplays for the mainstream Nepali film industry. He is a graduate of Whitman College, Walla Walla. He has been published in a couple of anthologies, translated two books, and has a few movies in preproduction.
