This writing workshop explores memory as both archive and imagination, in conversation with The Doctors exhibition, an exploration of pre-house Chicago party culture and the social worlds built by young Black creatives in Roseland.

Together, we will engage memory work as a living practice: listening to stories, images, and histories that move between documentation and myth, preservation and transformation. Drawing from the exhibition’s materials and themes, we will consider what it means to remember collectively, what gets held onto, what evolves, and how everyday Black life becomes spectacular through retelling.

Through guided prompts and shared reflection, we will move across time, past, present, and imagined futures, treating memory as a portal rather than a fixed record. Participants will be invited to write themselves into this continuum, encountering personal and communal histories as sites of creativity, speculation, and power.

Inspired by the visionary impulse embodied in stories like The Island of Lost Fathers, we will center intuition, imagination, and the ability to perceive beyond what is immediately visible. What do we inherit from those who came before us? What do we carry forward? What futures are we already dreaming into being?

This workshop is an invitation to engage your own archive, personal, familial, and cultural, and to reimagine it as a space of possibility. Trust what surfaces. Follow what calls. Write toward the spectacular.

Led by curatorial writer, DaJona Butler (The Doctors exhibition)