Mentee Spotlight: Erika Duncan of Herstory

“I like reinventing what the structure of a literary nonprofit should be. I like taking all the wisdom but then making it our own and hopefully contributing to the field.”

Since 2015, LitNYS’ mentoring program has provided organizations with additional support to sustain their gains long-term and to create a culture of continuity and leadership in the field.

In an effort to highlight the different literary organizations that we’re proud to have supported and collaborated with through our Peer Mentoring program, we are launching an interview series. 

This month we interviewed Erika Duncan, founder of Herstory. Under Duncan’s direction, Herstory has expanded from a single memoir writing workshop into “a growing network of national and international partners changing hearts, minds and policies.” 

*This interview has been edited for size and clarity.

LN: Can you describe the work that Herstory does?

ED: For 27 years, we have been working with a network that started as a single workshop, which was supposed to only last for weeks piggybacking off a conference on women breaking silences. I had offered a week of free workshops to any woman in the community who wanted to write her story. 

I decided immediately that this was a horrible idea. I had been used to teaching in the university or privately, but one way or the other, it was a consistent space.  At the conference I had offered a situation where people might be revealing things that were very intimate and vulnerable in a setting in which a stranger could walk in at any moment. It just felt like a bad idea. 

I decided to make a horrible situation a tiny bit better by creating this imaginary stranger/reader walking in on any “page one moment” of somebody’s life. To make a long story very short, I had created the roots of a pedagogy that would occupy me for the next quarter-century, completely changing my life as it would reach thousands over the decades that followed.

[The workshop] immediately created community, a sense of individual empowerment, and healing. I asked the town [in the Hamptons of Long Island] if we could have a space one morning and evening a week. It just grew like wildfire. People were bringing neighbors from all over Long Island, including family members and friends. Part of the success was the timing. This was 1996 and in the middle of the memoir craze where everybody was trying to write memoirs. But, many in the established literary world were very, very down on all these community memoir writing groups, and here we were developing a set of tools that was creating an alternative canon and working with human rights issues. We were bringing people together.

I think the biggest challenge was when I realized that I could no longer do it myself and it was turning into a bigger organization. Eventually the County dared me to create the training manual [for facilitators] that we still use today, which was in 2008. In 2010, Stony Brook University’s Educational Opportunity Program ordered the manual that I designed for facilitators. I said, “If we were to be working with 150 students transitioning from high school to college, they deserved their own workbook.” So, I created a second mini-manual  for younger writers. 

Around 2016, I realized we needed to formalize the training. At that point through LitTAP (now LitNYS), Gloria Jacobs was our mentor. I had this extraordinary 45-minute conversation with her in which we formulated how this training institute would be umbrellaed through a university and would offer a 13-week practicum followed by a 12-week field placement. First, we did it with Hofstra University’s Center for Civic Engagement and then after a couple of years we moved to Stony Brook University’s Humanities Institute, which is our home to this day. 

LN: Can you describe what the mentorship with LitTAP was like and what you gained from it?

ED: That was a total game changer. Both Gloria Jacobs and Ira Silverberg have continued to advise us at key moments, which makes us very grateful. I still see our training institute, which is the core of sustainability into the next quarter-century, as Gloria’s baby.  

When she suggested that it be umbrellaed at a university, we first thought it would be in partnership with an English or Education department, but we really did not want a university to take over the program. We wanted the independence to keep working in our own way for years to come. The model that Gloria came up with — based on what is commonly offered by schools of social work — where a 12-week practicum would be followed by a 12-week field placement made sense from the point of sustainability. 

The model became so intriguing that retired school principals, department heads in local colleges, and program officers at prestigious foundations joined our younger trainees at moments when they were seeking new directions in their lives. Ira Silverberg actually took the training while he was our mentor. It was fabulous to have Ira — a former program officer at the NEA —  working side-by-side with young Dreamers from the community. 

Right when we were doing our first workshops with students who crossed the border, I had these handwritten copies of rough translations from Spanish of a couple of student stories. Gloria and I agreed this work needed to be made into a book, which we were able to publish within a couple of months. The history of Brave Journeys/ Pasos Valientes would not be the same had Gloria not put us in touch with First Book, an organization of upwards of 450,000 educators dedicated to getting books into the hands of students who can’t afford them.

I am very proud to say that with no publicity and no big structure behind us, not only is this book being used in an increasing number of school districts throughout Long Island — it’s an anthology of 15 high school kids who crossed mountains, deserts, and rivers alone — over 8,000 copies have been sold nationally.

When Ira came on as our mentor, in addition to helping us to conceive new ways of thinking about our work in the national arena, he got us involved in staging outdoor events around the intersection of environmental justice and larger justice issues. He helped us during the pandemic to secure emergency funding, while increasing our network. He advised us on NEA, NYSCA, and pushed us to think deeply about what we wanted to do for our 25th anniversary, in terms of celebrating our legacy and taking us into the next quarter-century. 

I feel extraordinarily fortunate to have this support and to have our newest LitNYS grant that will allow us to bring the Brave Journeys Study Guide to more school districts and teachers.

LN: The mentorship experience does not just assist you in expanding your work in organic ways, but it also allowed you to anchor your work by establishing the training programs at the university. What advice would you give to people just starting out, wanting to do creative writing workshops?  What helps to establish longevity in this work?

ED: One piece of advice is to really dare to create something mission-based before you start to look for funding. We were just on a Zoom call with the Wyandanch School District where we have very deep roots. We have a wonderful grant for the summer that allows intensive work in this district and others. On the call, we were talking about the future and how to not let these kids down just because it’s the end of their five-week summer program. One of our facilitators said that so many organizations just come in, take what they need, get their funding, and then they leave. 

I said, “That is not us.” It has to start with the mission and caring for people.  The most important thing is that people love the communities. If you are not a real partner trying to do something, why? People have asked me, “What do you do to attract people coming out of prison? What do you do to attract immigrants?” It's a question that makes my hair stand on end. We do nothing special. We work with people. We listen and we have shared goals. 

LN: What is your favorite part of doing this work?

ED: One part is the people and seeing the stories emerge. I love doing the training workshops and collaborating with fellows to articulate the pedagogy. I want to do that forever. 

The other part is designing outside of the box projects. I love collaboration. Our succession plan was put in place to bring younger energy into the leadership role. When we finally had the funding to hire a part-time associate director, we spent six months looking for the right person, until we realized that the best choice would be someone in her 70’s who hailed from the Gullah Geechee region of South Carolina. Already, she’s created fabulous projects that will bring together North and South in dynamic new ways. 

Together we will be “growing our own” for the next couple of years, until we really have our successors in place. We will work together in a truly intergenerational model that will hopefully contribute to lessening fears around Founders Syndrome, to create fluid, vibrant, and sustainable models in which all can play an ongoing and dynamic part. 

I like reinventing what the structure of a literary nonprofit should be. I like taking all the wisdom but then making it our own and hopefully contributing to the field.