4-week CLASS: TURNING ANCESTRAL RESEARCH INTO PERSONAL NARRATIVE

WHEN:  WEDNESDAYS, SEPT 20, OCT 4, 11, 18. 1 - 3 PM PST

PRICE: Class is $500 sliding scale

WHO IT'S FOR: If you collect letters and old photographs in family albums, and you've already got stories about them in your mind or in journals. If you're obsessed with a particular ancestor. If you wonder about your origins and want to find a story for yourself that works for you. If you don't know how to make sense of all your questions about your family ancestry. If you want to find a through-line for your story in all the stories you've heard about your ancestral past.

WHEN YOU SIGN UP: You'll receive access to the class content page and some materials within 24 hours. A week or two before class, you'll get a reminder email from me, along with some preliminary readings and resources. All classes will be recorded and you'll have forever access to them when class is done.

ABOUT ME: I'm a peacock-follower. I'm a why person. If I find a curiosity, it'll be a long time before I stop chasing it. I love to teach and support other impossibly curious writers who wonder about the pieces that made them who they are.

FIVE REASONS (OF MANY) YOU'LL BE GLAD YOU DID THIS WORK

1. Connection. Insert grand statement about the ways technology and the modern world have us feeling disconnected from ourselves, each other, and the past. Given all that, this class sprouted from my deeply-held and life-long desire to sniff out my origins and histories. Even if you're a little curious, the connection you'll feel and make of details in your life may provide a renewed sense of comfort and curiosity about yourself and the world around you.
2. Clarity. Finding the details you want can be a needle-haystack situation. Making sense and teasing out the questions you have about the past can be overwhelming. Even if the facts remain ambiguous, your approach and interest in them will come through clearer with a few weeks' focus.
3. Sense of self, nbd. Doing this work was a gift I gave myself. Knowing more about my roots and making personal choices about what cultural traditions to keep alive and which don't work for me is wildly empowering. No one can tell me who or what I am as a result of the work I've done, and I hope you'll get that gift for yourself, too. <3
4. Support. No doubt about it: This work is hard. It's personal, it's messy, it's unstructured and entirely unique to you. This class is a way to do the research and writing while held in community with others who want to do it alongside you, and with a little guidance from someone who's done my own version of this deep dive.
5. Discovery. The writing of it all brought me revelatory perspective on myself, my history, my family. By studying craft while researching my past, I discovered parallels that really surprised me and excited me about the world and the echoes in our lives. My hope and intention is to guide you to your own surprises and delights.

WEEKLY BREAKDOWN

Week by week, we’ll build stories of ourselves from letters, photographs, public records, doctors’ prescriptions, dating profiles, and other sources via study of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Porochista Khakpour’s Brown Album, Sophia Shalmiyev’s Mother Winter, Elissa Washuta’s My Body is a Book of Rules, E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others, and a few others. We’ll combine primary sources and form in service to the nuances of our stories and identities. You will:

• Clearly define your most important question(s)
• Understand whose story you want to write
• ​Learn craft elements for research-based writing
• ​Generate new writing
• Get new resources to find pieces you're missing
• Create a community and a source of accountability for the work

You'll also get:

• A list of writer heroes to emulate
• Sample essays to imitate
• Extra prompts with you
• Lifetime access to the materials and class recording
• A collective discussion space on Discord where you can continue conversations after class is over, forever
• A working/live spreadsheet with all former students of class where you can share resources and research tools

WEEK ONE 

SETTING INTENTIONS AND DEFINING QUESTIONS

• Why I teach this class / why you’re taking this class
• Where I am in my research stage / where you are in your project
• Intention for what you’ll take away from this class / what I’ll offer
• Reading Elissa Washuta and Audre Lorde, prompts based on their work

WEEK TWO

DIGGING INTO YOUR RESEARCH

• What do you have collected? What's your inventory?
• Sharing resources / where you've found what you already have
• Focus on one piece of research or one question and your relationship to it. Where did this curiosity begin? Why do you want to ask these questions? How much do you know about your own history? How long have you felt that you wanted more information? Where or why did that feeling start?
• Reading E.J. Koh's The Magical Language of Others

WEEK THREE

FINDING MORE MATERIAL

• What have you been able to find since class began?
• Considering differences between writers we've read and why their approach works for their material.
• Getting support around different challenges in the research and writing.
• Reading Sophia Shalmiyev and Porochista Khakpour with a focus on how these writers began to digest what they know, learn about their families, ancestries, and histories, and how they attempt to incorporate what they learn into a present self.

WEEK FOUR

SHARPENING AND DEFINING YOUR VOICE AND STORY

• Reflection and discussion about who you most identify with and why? How do you differ from them all? What about your story haven't you read yet and why do you need to tell it? I promise, if you're here, you need to!
• What parallels and details can you find that run through your question(s) and research? We make a list and we generate material.
• Reading Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint's Names for Light: A Family History and Tanaïs' In Sensorium

Sliding scale and monthly payment plans are available. See bottom of the page for details.

NOT SURE IF YOU WANT TO COMMIT YET?

WHO THIS CLASS IS FOR:

• This class is for those sitting on piles of family documents and photos and journals and objects and are completely overwhelmed about what to do with all of it and what sense to make of it.
• This class is for those who have a distant relationship to their family for any number of reasons and want so much to understand themselves better in the context of that distance.
• This class is for witches and mediums and weirdos who believe that the ancestral past is alive and well in their present and every day lives.
• This class is for the endlessly curious and hungry to understand for themselves the ways collective history defines the individual, and how the individual can live in service to the collective future.

WHO THIS CLASS IS NOT FOR:

This isn't a research class, and I'm not a professional researcher. I'm a curious writer who has used the wisdom of librarians and guides to help me through the hairy parts of my journey, which has taken me to Eastern Europe and back. This class won't provide final answers, but many paths to take for finding your own answers. The class is less about finding more facts to use, than it is about how to make sense of what you already know, how to build on what you have, and offer some steps in how to discover more.

TESTIMONIALS

Katie is such a thoughtful and generous instructor. Her classes are full of well-designed exercises and rich research. Ancestral writing can be like wading into a swamp, but here, you don't have to go it alone. In a space that is both trauma-informed and risk-taking, we can access larger cultural conversations about writing history, family, lineage. I appreciate all her encouragement, wisdom, and community-knowledge-power! -- Celeste Chan, 2023-2024 Hugo House Fellow

In a way, memory can be as interpreted like fiction, but feel as personally static as fact. Katie guides us to uncover our personal histories through conventional approaches--oral interviews and research of archival documents--to exercises and modalities that uplift and honor how our built identities, family narratives, and right to be "a storyteller" are fundamental to ancestral history. As a new writer, this class was both challenging and empowering, but I felt especially supported through Katie's instruction, the class organization, and the curated readings from BIPOC and femme authors. -- Dimitri Groce, MSW

Katie is a warm and wise instructor who guides writers through a process of intergenerational research and healing. With Katie's guidance, we gave voice to ancestral joys and traumas and learned new formal processes for both marrying research and imagination. Katie curates a diverse and illuminating syllabus, and steers her courses with grace and expertise. You will come away from her class a better writer, thinker, and human. -- Catherine Carberry

WHO IS TEACHING THIS CLASS

Katie Ellison is a writer, a teacher, and a curator and host. She's been teaching online classes since 2016 on her own platforms as well as for Hugo House, Imprint Books, London Writers Salon, and elsewhere. She's published essays on the most personal subjects, very especially about ancestry and family dynamics, and is a huge champion of others who want to do the same.

She is not a therapist, mental health professional, trauma-informed facilitator, or any other credentialed human who could take on the depths that may arise from this work. She is a Scorpio moon and loves to go deep alone and in company, and is a great guide and companion for others who also like that or who don't go often.

*** REGISTRATION IS OPEN ***

A NOTE ABOUT PAYMENT

The class is $500 with a sliding scale to $350.

Payment plans and scholarships are available for all marginalized students with financial need.

TO PAY A DISCOUNTED RATE: On the checkout page, you can select any discount between $350 and $500. Please know that I offer these for those who need them, and that these classes are a primary source of income for me. If you can afford the full amount, it helps me pay my most essential bills.

All that said, if you need a discount, please take advantage.

The discount code for $450 is TARIPN450.

The discount code for $400 is TARIPN400.

And you guessed it: the discount code for $350 is TARIPN350.

You will be automatically charged. You're encouraged to choose whatever number is best for you.

TO CREATE A PAYMENT PLAN: If you need a different price than what's available or you need to pay in installments, please email me at katie dot lee dot ellison at gmail. I'm happy to work with you on a payment plan or other discounted rate. I don't want price to be a barrier for taking the class if you feel motivated to do the work.

Pricing created through guidance/class from Marlee Grace.