F145. Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family

Room 602/603, Washington State Convention Center, Level 6
Friday, February 28, 2014
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

Writing and publishing memoir about family members can be a vexed process, rife with concerns about privacy, fairness, and exploitation. The editor of the new collection Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family, together with four of its contributors, will discuss the challenges of writing about family members, share craft strategies, and offer ethical approaches for negotiating this difficult emotional and political terrain.


Participants

Moderator:

Joy Castro is the author of the novels Hell or High Water and Nearer Home, the memoir The Truth Book, and the essay collection Island of Bones, and she edited the collection Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family. She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Ralph James Savarese is the author of Reasonable People: A Memoir of Autism and Adoption, which Newsweek called a "real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities." A chapter was selected as a "notable essay" in the Best American Essays series. His creative nonfiction has appeared, among other places, in Ploughshares, Fourth Genre, and New England Review.

Sue William Silverman's books are The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew; Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You; and Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir. She teaches at Vermont College of Fine Arts.

Faith Adiele is author of Meeting Faith, a PEN award-winning memoir/travel diary and writer/subject/narrator of My Journey Home, a PBS documentary based on a memoir-in-progress about finding her global family. She teaches at California College of the Arts, Stanford, Berkeley, and around the world.

Stephanie Elizondo Griest is the author of two memoirs: Around the Bloc: My Life in Moscow, Beijing, and Havana and Mexican Enough: My Life Between the Borderlines; the guidebook 100 Places Every Woman Should Go; and she is editor of Best Women’s Travel Writing 2010. She teaches Creative Nonfiction at UNC-Chapel Hill.

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