Ethical Fabulation: Writing, the Archive, and the Creative Process

In conjunction with Re|Sounding, now on view, join Maine Maritime Museum this spring and summer for an artist workshop and lecture series. Each month from May through August, we are hosting a different contributing artist for a unique learning experience, each examining art as a tool for exploring histories, and uncovering how historical and cultural contexts can influence art.  What do we do when history goes quiet? When the archive is fragmented, distorted, or built to erase? In this lecture, Malaga Island descendant and poet-scholar Summer Tate introduces Ethical Fabulation as a creative method for writing into archival silence with care, restraint, and accountability. Drawing on research into dispossession and institutional narratives, where entire communities can be rendered as “case files” or reduced to euphemism, Tate explores how writing can hold what cannot be verified, while resisting the urge to “solve” the past through spectacle or narrative mastery. Moving between examples, craft discussion, and generative prompts, participants will learn how writers can ethically approach lived histories and inherited stories: how to listen for what’s missing, how to write with gaps rather than simply filling them, and how form, image, sound, and line breaks can become tools for honoring complexity. The talk also opens up Tate’s creative process, how poems begin, how research enters the lyric, and how revision becomes an ethical practice as much as an artistic one. Audience: Writers of all levels, readers, and anyone interested in history, memory, and imagination. Takeaway: Participants leave with a flexible set of strategies for writing poems that are grounded, vivid, and ethically attentive to what the record cannot fully contain. This in-person event is free, but preregistration is required. Register Today About the Artist Summer Tate is a poet and educator who teaches in Hartford, Connecticut. Her creative and scholarly work draws on research related to Malaga Island, including the ways dispossession and institutional archives shape what can be remembered, recorded, and recovered. She has published in various literary journals and is an adjunct professor at CT State Community Colleges. Summer holds a BA from Bay Path University, a Master's in English Education from UConn, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Fairfield University. She is currently a PhD candidate in American Literature at Howard University.