Bronx Memoir Project (BMP) Workshop Series: Inherited Memories

BCA's Bronx Memoir Project (BMP) Workshop Series is back for its 10th year! Multidisciplinary artist Alicia Anabel Santos returns to BMP with the series Inherited Memories: A Generative Memoir Writing Workshop. This free virtual series is open to all regardless of writing experience.

Participants will be writing into the layered textures of memory: the ones we lived, the ones we inherited, and the ones that live in-between. This four-part generative workshop is built around the idea that our stories don’t start or end with us; they stretch across generations, land, family, silence, and imagination. Each week, Alicia and participants will take on a new theme and build writing from prompts that encourage discovery, depth, and surprise. Come ready to write, to share pieces of your work in community, and to leave with a growing body of new material for your memoir project.

Class I: Memory as Inheritance

Tuesday, September 9, 2025, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Participants will begin by writing into what we carry from those who came before us—family stories, cultural myths, generational echoes. What memories have been passed down, and how do they shape the way we remember?

Class II: The Body Remembers

Tuesday, September 16, 2025, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

This week, participants will explore embodied memory—how gesture, sensation, and instinct carry stories that words sometimes cannot. We’ll generate work that taps into the physical archive of memory.

In observance of Rosh Hashanah, there will be no BMP workshop during the week of September 22nd.

Class III: Silence, Secrets, and Gaps

Tuesday, September 30, 2025, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Inherited memory isn’t only about what’s been said, but also what’s been left unsaid. Together, Alicia and participants will write into silences, omissions, and family secrets to uncover how absence holds story.

Class IV: Imagined and Reimagined Memory

Tuesday, October 7, 2025, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

Alicia and participants will close the series by experimenting with reimagining: how memory can be reshaped, retold, and transformed into art. Writers will share excerpts of their work and reflect on the paths these pieces might take beyond the workshop.

By the end of the four weeks, you’ll leave with a constellation of new writing, a deeper relationship to your inherited memories, and momentum for whatever memoir project is calling to you.