Please note that there are 14 in-person tickets and 12 Zoom tickets available.
Sessions run for two hours.
Held on Wednesdays, August 26th, September 2nd and September 9th in Brunswick, Naarm/Melbourne.
How do we live with what remains?
This workshop marks the beginning of an ongoing series exploring how art, and specifically literature, remembers.
Each instalment will focus on a different place, period or literary tradition, asking how writers preserve the textures of ordinary life against the flattening force of official history. We begin in Central and Eastern Europe, where the twentieth century repeatedly dissolved empires, redrew borders, displaced communities and transformed everyday existence. Few literary traditions have wrestled more profoundly with the relationship between memory, history and lived experience.
History tends to record dates, wars, borders and political change. Literature records something else entirely. It preserves family rituals, childhood myths, forgotten languages, domestic spaces, photographs, recipes, streets and the quiet habits that rarely survive in official accounts.
Across the twentieth century and into the present, writers, poets, artists and filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe turned towards these intimate forms of experience, asking not simply what happened, but what it felt like to live through a century of upheaval. Their work offers another kind of historical record—one built from fragments, objects and lived experience rather than monuments and archives.
Session One — The Self Remembers
26th August, 6pm to 8pm
We begin with memory as an individual experience. We'll explore how writers transform memory into dream, sensation and myth, moving between fiction, poetry, music and visual art to ask how childhood becomes legend, why recollection so often blurs with imagination, and whether literature can capture experiences that resist straightforward narration.
Session Two — The Family Remembers
2nd September, 6pm to 8pm
History is often inherited long before it is understood. Families preserve the past not only through stories, but through silence, ritual, domestic spaces and everyday objects. We'll explore writers and artists who transformed the home into an archive of private life, tracing the ways love, resentment, absence and generational memory shape our understanding of history from within the family.
Session Three — Collective Memory
9th September, 6pm to 8pm
When private memory enters public life, it becomes entangled with politics, commemoration and forgetting. We'll examine how writers and artists challenge official narratives by preserving voices, experiences and histories that states have attempted to erase or simplify. Together we'll ask who shapes collective memory, what literature can preserve that monuments and archives cannot, and how fiction, poetry, film and art become acts of historical witness.
Format
Across three sessions, we'll explore memory at three interconnected scales: the self, the family and collective memory. Beginning with the imaginative landscapes of individual memory, we'll move through the inherited worlds of domestic life before arriving at the contested terrain of public remembrance.
Each session combines close reading, discussion and historical context, moving across novels, poetry, memoir, film, photography, music and visual art. Rather than attempting a comprehensive survey, we'll follow recurring questions, images and themes across different writers and artistic forms, using them to build unexpected connections between individual works and broader cultural histories. No specialist knowledge is expected, and the focus is on conversation rather than lectures or "correct" interpretations.
There is no expectation to attend all sessions, you can come to as few or as many as you like. We do however encourage you to attend all of them if you can, as you will get the most out of the workshop this way.
Who is this for?
This series is open to anyone with an interest in literature, history, art or ideas. Whether you're a long-time reader of Central and Eastern European writing or encountering these authors for the first time, the workshops are designed to be accessible without sacrificing depth. You don't need an academic background or to complete every reading beforehand—curiosity is far more important than expertise. If you've ever wondered how literature preserves the parts of history that official accounts leave behind, you'll probably find yourself at home here.
