T221.
A Misfit of Ghosts: How Haunted Memoir Rethinks the Real
Thursday, March 24, 2022
3:20 pm to 4:35 pm
Haunted memoir unsettles traditional notions of memoir and nonfiction as it engages with ghosts, both metaphoric and actual, to examine what haunts us collectively and individually. In this session, panelists will discuss the various forms hauntings have taken in their work, how haunted memoir pushes against the constraints of normative nonfiction, as well as discuss how they create their ghosts on the page.
Participants
Bruce Owens Grimm is a queer ghost nerd based in Chicago. He is a coeditor of Fat & Queer: An Anthology of Queer & Trans Bodies & Lives. He attended the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop and taught his "Haunted Memoir" workshop at Story Studio Chicago and the Desert Nights, Rising Stars Conference.
Elissa Washuta (Cowlitz Indian Tribe) is the author of White Magic, My Body Is a Book of Rules, and Starvation Mode, and coeditor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an assistant professor at the Ohio State University.
Steffan Triplett is a Black, queer writer from Missouri. He received his MFA in nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh.
Jami Nakamura Lin is the author of The Night Parade, a speculative memoir illustrated by her sister Cori. She is a 2016 NEA U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellow and a former Catapult columnist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times and Electric Lit.
J. Nicole Jones received an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University and has held editorial positions at VICE and VanityFair.com. Her essays and writing have appeared in the LA Review of Books and VanityFair.com, among others. Her memoir Low Country was published in 2021 by Catapult.
