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Cynthia Guardado's Memories We Never Had: Writing in a Postcolonial Existence


Sundress Publications’ Craft Chaps offer “substantive essays by contemporary writers on creative writing practice. Each chap focuses on one aspect of craft and also contains a writing exercise and bibliography for further reading.”

In the vein of A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing by David Mura and Felicia Rose Chavez’s The Anti-Racist Writing Workshop: How To Decolonize the Creative Classroom, Cynthia Guardado’s craft chap, Memories We Never Had: Writing in a Postcolonial Existence, guides us through the process of writing by encouraging “Black, indigenous, and persons of color in a colonized society” to interrogate the biases within ourselves and our educational systems. In response to the erasure of colonized people’s stories, Guardado encourages BIPOC writers to see writing as “a tool for us to take ownership.” Guardado assuages the fear of writing without a complete memory or historical record by saying, “I’m here to tell you that you must write about what you can’t remember. You must write about history even if you do not have all the pieces, because in doing so you are writing about loss—you are writing about the lack of—you are writing a history only you can tell.”


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