S149.
Writing about Kith and Kin: Dos & Don’ts, Rights & Wrongs, Risks & Rewards
Saturday, March 11, 2023
10:35 am to 11:50 am
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott writes: “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Easy to say, difficult to execute. When it comes to writing about real people in memoir, some writers opt to tell all (Frank McCourt), while others avoid the intimate (Dinty Moore), change names (Stephanie Land), or create composite characters (Jeannine Ouellette). Authors have a passion for robust creative expression, but should we write whatever we want, even if it’s true?
Participants
Jennifer Lang, born in the San Francisco Bay Area, immigrated to Tel Aviv, where she runs Israel Writers Studio, hosts literary salons, cohosts Writers Near & Far, and teaches yoga. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and serves as assistant editor for Brevity Journal.
Thea Rademacher, honors law school graduate from University of Minnesota, represented hundreds of clients in domestic violence cases as a Legal Aid attorney. In 2014, a book project with a friend about his secret mission in WWII inspired her to start a publishing, consulting, and speaking business.
Helena Rho, a former assistant professor of pediatrics, earned her MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of Pittsburgh. Her memoir, American Seoul, was an Amazon Book Editors' Best Books of May 2022 and included in BuzzFeed's 16 Memoirs by AAPI Authors to Add to Your Reading List.
Jody Keisner is the author of Under My Bed and Other Essays. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Assay, Threepenny Review, The Normal School, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor of English and the editor of The Linden Review.
Allison Hong Merrill is a Taiwanese immigrant who writes in both Chinese and English, both fiction and creative nonfiction. Her work has won both national and international awards. She is the creative nonfiction editor at Dialogue Journal and the author of Ninety-Nine Fire Hoops, A Memoir.
