Write down one word that only belongs to you. Don’t explain it. That’s where we’ll begin.

Sometimes home is a place. Sometimes it is a person. Sometimes it is a single word. For me, it might be Ghighì – a nickname my dad called me as a child. It doesn’t have a “dictionary meaning”, but it carries a whole relationship, a voice, and a version of myself that exists nowhere else. Drawing on my background in Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and my research interest in translanguaging, this workshop invites fellow writers to discover how apparently ordinary words can become unexpected doorways into memory, identity and belonging.

We’ll begin with a single word: a nickname, a family saying, a dialect expression, a misheard lyric, a word we’ve never found a satisfying translation for, or simply a word we’ve carried with us for years.

From there, a series of prompts will encourage participants to follow where that word leads. For example:

• Who was the last person to say this word to you?
• What room does this word belong to?
• What would be lost if you translated it?
• Which language did this memory arrive in?

The workshop welcomes multilingual and monolingual writers alike.