“To teach, write, and live to create empathy—that is our goal,
whether we are working with third graders or with
people who’ve spent their lives navigating the prison system.
We all know our own stories, but it is not until we shape them
in writing that we begin to know our journeys.”
- Erika Duncan, Herstory's Founding Executive and Artistic Director
Our Beginnings
What began as a single experiment grew into an international network of guided memoir-writing workshops called the Herstory Writers Network
Novelist and essayist Erika Duncan first posed a simple yet powerful question in March 1996: “Where would you like a Stranger-Reader to meet you, if you had to choose any imaginary ‘page one moment’ to help that person walk in your shoes?”
Erika Duncan, Herstory Founder
She asked this of a group of women with little or no creative writing experience during a week of free memoir-writing workshops she offered following a conference on women breaking silences in Southampton, New York. Although Erika had years of experience teaching writing, she worried she had opened Pandora’s Box by inviting participants to share the most difficult or intimate moments of their lives with strangers they might never see again.
Within days, however, she realized she had discovered something new: a way of teaching memoir that combined literary craft with healing and community-building. At the heart of this emerging approach was the idea of creating empathy in a Stranger-Reader from the very first scene—the “page one moment.”
Word spread quickly. Women of different generations and backgrounds began traveling long distances to attend Herstory’s workshops at the Southampton Cultural Center, and new partnerships soon followed with counseling centers, community organizations, and senior facilities. Participants included survivors of domestic violence, incest, poverty, and war writing alongside women sharing stories of immigration, love, birth, and loss.
As workshops spread across Long Island, Erika began training others in Herstory’s empathy-centered pedagogy so that more communities could access this transformative work. Women who had written in early workshops started facilitating their own groups, and new programs were created to amplify marginalized voices, including Latina and incarcerated women.
By 2010, Herstory workshops were taking place in schools, correctional facilities, universities, libraries, senior centers, and community organizations and had expanded to include people of all genders.
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Erika’s simple dare many years earlier to transform one’s most personal story into a work of art capable of touching the heart of a stranger launched the creation of an international, ever-expanding network of guided memoir-writing workshops—Herstory Writers Network.
To read more about our beginnings and the roots of Herstory’s methodology, please see the introduction to Paper Stranger: Shaping Stories In Community, our Herstory pedagogy “textbook” that forms the basis of our facilitator training program.
Erika Duncan being honored at the 2024 Nassau BOCES Education Partners