S116.
Grief: What is it Good For?
Saturday, February 10, 2024
9:00 am to 10:15 am
Absolutely everything. While many view grief only as tragedy, these four writers dive in to find connection, community, love, and joy. An exploration of their writing shows the value of investigating grief and specific ways of doing so on the page. In this moderated Q&A, panelists showcase how they approach grief, the importance of doing so, the ethics of including those gone, and the various craft techniques used to find value in mourning.
Participants
Maddie Norris is the author of The Wet Wound: An Elegy in Essays. She earned her MFA at the University of Arizona and before that was the Thomas Wolfe scholar at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her work can be found in Guernica, Fourth Genre, and Territory, among others.
Ross Gay is the author of the poetry collections Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude; and the essay collection The Book of Delights. He teaches at Indiana University.
Kathryn Savage's debut essay Groundglass was published last year by Coffee House Press. Other writing has recently appeared in BOMB, Ecotone, Guernica, and VQR. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint is the author of the novel The End of Peril, the End of Enmity, the End of Strife, A Haven (Noemi Press, 2018), which won an Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Names for Light: A Family History (Graywolf Press, 2021), which won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.
