R151. Guilty Pleasures: Autobiography into Fiction

Archives, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Four
Thursday, February 9, 2017
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

This panel will examine the ways that writers formed by memoir and the personal essay utilize their life story as a catalyst for fiction. How do writers use the emotional capacities of the self as a model for a fictional character? How do they embellish, complicate, and make revelatory the known self, the self whose paradox is the tension of their being? Such characterization suggests a delicate negotiation between vanity and abjection, aggrandizement and repression. Why not stay with memoir?


Participants

Moderator:

Patricia Foster is a professor in the MFA Program in Nonfiction at the University of Iowa. She is the author of All the Lost Girls (memoir), Just beneath My Skin (essays), Girl from Soldier Creek (novel), and editor of Minding the Body; Sister to Sister; and Understanding the Essay.

Bonnie Friedman is the author of the books Writing Past DarkThe Thief of Happiness, and Surrendering Oz: A Life in Essays, longlisted for the PEN award in the Art of the Essay. Her work has appeared in The Best American Movie WritingThe Best Writing on Writing, and The Best Buddhist Writing.

Alice Elliott Dark is the author of three books of fiction, Naked to the Waist, In the Gloaming, and Think of England. A fourth novel is coming soon. She teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers-Newark.

Marilyn Abildskov is the author of The Men In My Country. Recent essays and short stories have appeared in The Pinch, The Sun, AGNI, The Rumpus, and Laurel Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Saint Mary's College of California.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center