F158.
'Til Death (or Edits) Do Us Part: The Significant Other in Creative Nonfiction
Friday, February 9, 2024
10:35 am to 11:50 am
Recreating our lives in creative nonfiction includes depicting our romantic partners. How do approaches vary in choosing what to include or omit? What are the ethics of documenting conversations, including arguments, and asking permission? What happens if a lover becomes an ex—sometimes midway through the publication process? Five authors of memoir and personal essays discuss the challenges of sharing intimate relationships on the page, and give the audience takeaway tips for their own projects.
Participants
Sandra Beasley is author of four poetry collections, most recently Made to Explode, as well as Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, a disability memoir. She lives in Washington, DC, and teaches with the University of Nebraska Omaha low-residency MFA in creative writing.
Angie Chuang is a nonfiction writer and an associate professor of journalism at University of Colorado Boulder. Her first book, The Four Words for Home, won an Independent Publishers Award. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Litro, the Asian American Literary Review, Vela, and others.
Davon Loeb is the author of the memoir The In-Betweens. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Camden. Davon is an assistant features editor at The Rumpus. His work is featured at The Sun, Joyland, Catapult, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.
Sarah Viren is the author of Mine, winner of the River Teeth Book Prize and GLCA New Writers Award, and To Name the Bigger Lie, which was published by Scribner in 2023. She's a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and teaches in the creative writing program at ASU.
John Cotter is the author of the memoir Losing Music and the novel Under the Small Lights. His essays and short fiction have recently appeared, or soon will, in New York Times Magazine, Epoch, Guernica, Prairie Schooner, and New England Review. He lives in Providence.
