The Writer’s Center welcomes Kim Roberts, David Nicholson, and David Taylor for a conversation and practical creative exercises on how to research in your writing. This event will also include examples of local resources.

About the Event

How can real-world research foster your creative work and thinking? In connection with The People’s Recorder podcast, this conversation with three DMV writers starts from the experiences of writers in a Depression-era cultural experiment, the Federal Writers’ Project. And it comes up to now with views from writers today about how research and interviews feed their own creative work.

As heard in the People’s Recorder podcast, many emerging writers in the 1930s found their voices in community with peers on a government project intended to put people to work documenting American life and history. Young writers — including some who later grew to prominence including Margaret Walker, Tillie Olsen, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and John Cheever — honed skills in archival research, oral history interviews, and street-level research. Those skills also helped in shaping their distinctive voices in poetry, novels and nonfiction.