Notes From A Dark Laboratory: A Writing Workshop with Tao Leigh Goffe

Join us as we conclude our book club read Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean and the Origins of the Climate Crisis with the author!

Event Description:

Join us at King Manor Museum for an interactive public program accompanying the book club for Tao Leigh Goffe’s Dark Laboratory. Author Tao Leigh Goffe will join us for a discussion on how she blended nature and science writing along with memoir to write an expansive investigation on colonialism’s role in climate change. This is the conclusion of our King Manor x Melting Metropolis reading circle.

After the discussion, Goffe will lead a creative writing workshop on memory, water, and climate. Attendees will reflect and document what it means to live in Southeast Queens during the climate crisis and what actions we can take to safeguard our future.

This event is twofold: attendees will have the option to either join the book discussion, the writing workshop, or both! You do not need to be a member of the book club to join either event.

This program is free and open to the public. Attendees can join in-person or online.

Schedule:

12-1:15pm: Book discussion with Tao Leigh Goffe

1:15-1:30pm: Intermission

1:30-2:30pm: Creative Writing Workshop with Tao Leigh Goffe

About The Creative Writing Workshop:

Memory Floods: Writing, Water, and the Wetlands of Queens

Memory Floods is a creative writing and water-mapping workshop that explores how landscapes remember, especially in southeast Queens, where urban marshlands reveal the region’s wetland past each time it rains.

Together, participants will reflect on intergenerational memory through water, not only what we inherit through family stories, but what we inherit through place and our neighborhoods. Why do certain blocks flood while others stay dry? What histories of race, white flight, urban planning, and environmental neglect shape where water pools? How do erased waterways and filled-in marshes continue to structure everyday life? Through guided prompts and collaborative freehand mapping, we will trace the hidden hydrology of the borough and consider how memory lives in shoreline, soil, pavement, and infrastructure.

No prior creative writing experience is needed. This workshop welcomes readers, students, and neighbors interested in storytelling, environmental justice, and local history. By the end of the session, participants will leave with new tools for reading the city through water, and for imagining more just futures in the face of rising seas and intensifying storms

Come prepared to share memories, photos, observations, and curiosity about the places you move through every day.

About The Author:

Tao Leigh Goffe is an award winning historian, professor, and artist who grew up between London, where she was born, and New York City. Her research explores race, climate and creative technology. She studied English literature at Princeton University before earning a PhD at Yale University. She lives and works in Manhattan, where she is an associate professor at Hunter College.

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This event is made possible, in part, with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by New York Foundation for the Arts.