The experience

“Dear Grandparents”: creative writing workshop to tell your roots journey

You are ready, at last, to arrive in Puglia: your “journey of roots” will be a unique experience with high emotional value that will perhaps change you forever. You have chosen to embark on a geographical and inner adventure, one that will take you back along the tracks of your family, in search of the forgotten pages of your history, in which everything, from the sounds of dialects to the names of villages, still seems to want to speak to you and ask you questions. An adventure that deserves to be cherished, remembered and told.

This workshop will be the tool with which you can hold together the pages of your memories and the new ones moved by your steps along the Heel of Italy. “Dear Grandparents” will help you prepare your “ideal letter” from Puglia addressed to your ancestors, to close the circle of their migratory history, which started from these very lands and returned here thanks to you.

A letter between present and past with creative writing

Under the guidance of a professional storytelling expert, you can spend the right amount of time jotting down faces, landscapes, stories, and every other detail of your roots journey. You will be prepared for the journey through a nimble lesson in “tips and best practices,” which are essential for organizing your notes at the various stages of your journey without missing important details for writing your letter.

You will finally meet in person, for the creative writing workshop, which can be conducted in Italian, if you wish to test your skills in the language of your origins, or in another language with the help of an interpreter. You will reopen together your notes, the photographs you brought with you in your suitcase and those taken on your trip, and from this material you will begin to create your text. Words written by great Italian or Italodescendant authors who have told their own encounters with their country of origin will also come to your rescue.

“Dear Grandparents” will be the “magic formula” with which you will recall the stories heard in your family and, at the same time, tell “your Puglia,” as you yourself experienced it on your roots journey. The letter will thus become a “borderline” text, crisscrossed with diary fragments, mémoires and travel reports, which will give value to your memories and thoughts, in the days that will change your life.

The creative writing workshop will be held in one of the museums of the Network of Biblio-Museum Poles of Puglia-between ethnographic and memory museums, local traditions and rural civilization-in whose spaces you will find the inspiration and concentration suitable for your writing. If you choose to stop in Lecce, your expressive verve will find its rightful place in “La Fabbrica delle Parole,” an incredible printing museum where you can breathe in the atmosphere of a traditional print shop.