Yvonne Brown (Yvonne Shorter Brown) is a retired teacher and university lecturer. She is an independent researcher and writer on subjects pertaining to the socio-political and economic transformations in post-emancipation Jamaica; and the status of African/Black people in the education system in Canada. In 2010 she published the first edition of her memoir Dead Woman Pickney: A Memoir of Childhood in Jamaica. In 2022 she published the 2nd edition. Both are published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press. She is currently researching in the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, UK and Jamaica to write a political biography of the Honourable Charles Archibald Reid 1887-1944.
Scholarly articles" Ghosts in the Canadian Multicultural Machine: A Tale of the Absent Presence of Black People in Canada Journal of Black Studies 38(3), 374-387.
Ah Whey Dem Say Feh Demself: African/Black Peoples Auto/Biographies as Pedagogical Tools: Cultural and Pedagogical Inquiry, 2011, 3(2), 4-15.
What makes auto-ethnography both similar and different from memoir and autobiography?
Working out a Creative Non-Fiction Framework for posing researchable questions, identifying primary and secondary sources, making decisions about what sort of story one wants to tell, selection of issues/themes and person/characters, ethical considerations.
TITLE: Constructing Autobiography for Retirees and other Adults
This is a beginners workshop which is geared to adults, especially retirees, who would like to write about remarkable episodes in their life, but do not know where or how to begin. Life stories are an important way for persons to record historical events and give personal assessments of their life and times. By the time one retires, one has experienced and witnessed many changes in world events, public policies, community and family events that mark life passages. The product may be for the family archive and or for publication. One might also want to write a series of short stories.
In this workshop, participants will do short writing exercises that focus the nature of four aspects of memory from which to excavate primary material 1) autobiographical 2) Genetic 3) topographical 4) archival.
