MASTER CLASS

The Memory Map: Land As Memoryscape

Byron F. Aspaas

Writing is a tool for deep reflection inside poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, as well as any other types of art that exists. Like art, writing can chip away the surface area to create different effigies through texture on the page; writing can paint itself into a creation of different colors inside canyons and scrawls through language; writing can also mold and form and reshape patterns while using different elements to press or scrape or score each line to work in the artist’s favor—linework exists inversely for each creator. As an artist, I have learned writing can be translated into different mediums of different ideas to carve different narratives of a writer’s memory.

To me, light can reveal the inner surfaces and change the temperature of colors throughout different times of the day—and as time fades, memory can be preserved through the art in which holds space inside the contours of craft. As we explore the whitespace of the page and re/create through generative practices, it is my hope to revive and revisit the mysteries of the mind through the different instillations of lyric prose.

As we explore the memoryscape upon story each day, we will remove the different layers of silt to expose the different types of aggregate the minds hold—and to remove each lining of sediment will then reveal a different bedding. To unearth the mantle then begins.

What holds the story of the memory map?