Creative Writing Workshop: Turning Memories into Narratives with M Lin
We’ll dive deep into craft and transform personal memories into plotlines and narrative structures. M will examine her own writing process from an idea to a finished draft and how to represent political realities while resisting state narratives, censorship, and self-censorship.
Something has shifted for Chinese women and the global Chinese diaspora that has been building for more than a decade. Like women-led protests against sexual violence in India and Bangladesh, South Korea's 4B movement, and gender justice campaigns across Latin America and Africa, Chinese women have increasingly demanded greater rights and visibility.
And yet this progress is shadowed by erasure. The feminist activists who chained themselves to railings and the #MeToo Weibo accounts deleted overnight have been censored and even erased from online memory.
Literature may be one of the few places where the memory of this survives. Writers like M Lin – whose debut short story collection The Memory Museum renders contemporary Chinese life with the precision of someone who has had to learn to see it from the outside – are painting the picture of this generation with vivid detail.
Writing is, first and foremost, a private act, a way of sitting with memory, contradiction, and history on your own terms, beyond the reach of state or social pressure. But writing is also communal. When we write together, share our work, and read one another's words, our stories enter into conversation. They accumulate into something larger than any single voice.
In this workshop, M will guide participants through exercises designed to surface the stories that live at the intersection of the personal and the political: a grandmother's silence, a border crossing, a word that doesn't translate. The workshop is open to writers working in all genres: fiction, nonfiction, playwriting, and poetry, at any stage of their practice. We’ll dive deep into craft and transform personal memories into plotlines and narrative structures; during class time, M will examine her own writing process from idea to a finished draft: how to represent political realities while resisting state narratives, censorship, and self-censorship and how the most personal becomes a shared experience between the reader and the author.
You can listen to M Lin’s interview with NüVoices here: https://nuvoices.com/podcast/a-conversation-with-m-lin-author-of-the-memory-museum
What to expect:
Participants will read a short assigned piece ahead of the session. The workshop will include guided writing exercises, group sharing, and reflection on how our own memories and positionalities shape the stories we tell – and the ones we've been told not to.
All proceeds of this workshop will be distributed to our workshop leaders and to support the NüVoices’ ongoing editorial and nonprofit operations. We encourage participants and community members to donate to our Paypal page if you are financially able to support our ongoing initiatives.
The session will be recorded for distribution to registrants.
About M Lin:
M Lin is a Chinese writer and translator living in the US. Born and raised in Beijing, she writes in English as her second language. Her debut short story collection, The Memory Museum, is published by Graywolf Press in April 2026, including stories that have appeared in Ploughshares, Electric Literature, Swamp Pink, Joyland, Epiphany, and Fence. Her nonfiction and translations can be read in The New York Times, Guernica, Words Without Borders, The Margins, and elsewhere.
About NüVoices:
NüVoices is an international editorial collective gathering veteran and emerging writers, journalists, translators and artists to celebrate and support the diverse creative work of women and other underrepresented voices/communities working on the subject of China (broadly defined). Founded in 2018 and supported by Patreon donors, NüVoices is an independent not-for-profit organization. The views and opinions expressed by contributors on our platforms do not necessarily reflect those of NüVoices.
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