Loading Events

« All Events

  • This event has passed.

Inprint/Finnigan Park Senior Memoir Workshop Celebration

Wednesday May 25, 2016 2:00 pm

Where

The Ensemble Theatre
3535 Main Street
Houston, TX 77002 United States
+ Google Map

Inprint presents the 2016 Inprint/Finnigan Park Senior Memoir Workshop Celebration. Twelve senior citizens enrolled in the Inprint Senior Memoir Workshop at the Finnigan Park Community Center, hosted by Harris County Precinct One Commissioner Gene Locke, will give 5 – 10 minute readings from their work, sharing life stories with family and friends. Light refreshments will be served. The reading is free and open to the public.

The Inprint Finnigan Park senior memoir workshops have been running since 2002, and the current group of senior writers have been meeting on a weekly basis since September 2015. This year the participants have been working on individual writing projects, and excerpts of their work are collected in an anthology which will be presented at the celebratory reading. The seniors writing ranges in style and content, including stories about family, childhood, neighborhood, and a changing world.

This year, fiction writer and University of Houston Creative Writing Program graduate student Sam Dinger has led the workshop. “At ninety minutes, our classes are short, so I try to pack in as much as we can. We start with sharing what students have written the week prior and give criticism after each reading. Then I pass out a reading—usually an essay, but sometimes poems—and we read together, taking notes and discussing the selection. One of the main focuses of the spring has been on developing our ability to read like writers, with an eye for how a piece of writing is made.”

These workshops are part of the Inprint Senior Memoir Workshop program which, for more than 20 years, has provided a professional writer to work with groups of senior citizens at different community centers throughout the city. Similar Inprint workshops are currently running at the Jewish Community Center and Amazing Place, a day center for seniors with dementia.