Molly Boeder Harris, a graduate of our pilot Stories We Tell workshop at the Chicago Cultural Center.
The stories we tell can change the world.
How do we create lasting social change? One powerful, purposeful story at a time.
The Stories We Tell, The Voices and Faces Project’s immersive, two-day testimonial writing program, was developed to help those who have survived or witnessed gender-based violence use their stories to call the public to greater compassion and social action.
During our writing workshop, participants discuss examples of world-changing testimonial writing from various social movements and take part in a series of innovative, real-time writing exercises. We seek to support emerging and established writers, activists, and direct service providers as they think about what testimonial writing is and why it matters. We help workshop participants imagine how they can most effectively carry forward the work of witness. Above all, we encourage the creativity of our participants, leading them to find new sources of personal and political power within themselves.
A Stories We Tell workshop at RefuSHE in Nairobi, Kenya.
We’re not just training writers. We’re creating community.
Our trauma-informed creative writing instructor and workshop facilitator are media neutral and genre-inclusive. We examine poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction, memoir, spoken word, playwriting, and speechwriting, and encourage work in all these areas. Most important, we focus on creating a community of activists ready to go public with their stories. The power of the stories emerging from The Stories We Tell is twofold. They call the public to an honest accounting of gender-based violence, and they attest to the strength that survivors find in a safe, creatively challenging community.
Since its inception in 2011, our Stories We Tell workshop team has traveled across the North American and African continents and trained over 1200 writer-activists. In 2016 The Voices and Faces Project launched a youth-focused edition of The Stories We Tell, targeted to at-risk girls ages 15 – 18. Most recently, we expanded our writing program to reach refugee women and girls in Nairobi, Kenya, through our ongoing partnership with RefuSHE, a United Nations NGO.
Our Stories We Tell workshop at Aperture Gallery in New York City.
We’re breaking through ideological barriers, one storyteller at a time.
In an era of information saturation and compassion fatigue — and often divisive political discourse — a well-told story breaks through ideological barriers in a way statistics alone cannot. When we testify about our own experiences with gender-based violence, we draw people out of their comfort zones and into conversations they might not otherwise have.
Too often in our society language becomes a tool for avoiding the realities of rape and abuse. The devastation that is childhood sexual abuse becomes simply “a family affair,” the international trafficking of women and girls merely “the world’s oldest profession,” and rape and torture during armed conflict part of the inevitable, regrettable “messiness of war.”
Our Stories We Tell workshop participants are doing something different with language. Through their testimony and writing, they take us close — at times, painfully close — to the experiences they have lived through or witnessed. And they show us that behind every social injustice lies a story with the power to create change.
Meet our Stories We Tell co-creators.
Workshop Instructor R. Clifton Spargo is a novelist and cultural critic who teaches creative writing at Yale University. An alumnus of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is author of the novel Beautiful Fools, which Pulitzer Prize-winner Andrew Sean Greer describes as a “marvel of a book,” as well as award-winning stories published in The Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review and other publications. Clifton’s essays on literature, music, and culture have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Huffington Post and The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan. An expert in ethics, testimony, and Holocaust studies, he is a former fellow at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and author of two books of literary philosophy on ethics, mourning, and the cultural memory of injustice.
Workshop facilitator Anne K. Ream is the founder of The Voices and Faces Project, an award-winning storytelling project, and the author of Lived Through This, her critically praised memoir of a global journey spent listening to gender-based violence survivors, which is currently being adapted for the theatre. Anne’s writing has appeared in The New Republic, Los Angeles Times, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, Washington Post, and elsewhere. A founding board member of Art Works for Change and an advisory board member of RAINN, the country’s largest anti-sexual violence organization, Anne is also the founding co-chair of World Without Exploitation, the national coalition to end human trafficking and sexual exploitation.
Upcoming writing workshop schedule.
BREAKING FREE: A writing and storytelling workshop for survivors of religious trauma
Fall, 2024 ( Dates TBA)
CHICAGO, IL
Simmons Center for Global Chicago
In partnership with Linda Kay Klein and Break Free Together
