Writing Workshop: Writing About Family Heirlooms – ROEN

Family heirlooms offer rich opportunities for writing about family history. For this session, please bring one or more family heirlooms—either the physical object or a mental image of it. Duane Roen will introduce several writing activities for seeing the descriptive and narrative details found in those heirlooms (so please bring paper and pen or a laptop).

Duane Roen has been tracing his roots since his teenage years, building a database with more than 32,000 ancestors. He and his wife, Maureen Roen, have also been recording their family history since 1978 by writing more than 19,000 daily journal entries on their children and other family members. Combining his professional and personal interests, Duane worked with colleagues to establish courses on writing and recording family history at Arizona State University. He also is founding coordinator of the Project for Writing and Recording Family History in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at ASU.

Click here to download and print the class handout