R105. Stranger than Fiction: Personal Essay in the Age of the Internet

Room 101 D&E, Level 1
Thursday, April 9, 2015
9:00 am to 10:15 am

 

What does it mean to write a personal essay in the age of the internet? And how do we decide what is truth when we as writers are expected to tangle with the pressure to create public personas? The personal essayists on this panel will discuss how they maneuver through these challenges–building brand, navigating social media, defining creative nonfiction, and yes, finding the truth in our writing, when the truth is filtered through the endless platforms that comprise our lives today.


Participants

Moderator:

Anna March's nonfiction, fiction, and poetry appear in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Salon, the Rumpus, and many other publications. She writes extensively on sexuality and feminism. Her novel, The Diary of Suzanne Frank, is forthcoming, as is her memoir.

Ben Tanzer is the author of the books My Father’s House, You Can Make Him Like You, Orphans, and Lost in Space, among others. He directs publicity and content strategy for Curbside Splendor and can be found online at This Blog Will Change Your Life, the center of his growing lifestyle empire.

Megan Stielstra is the author of Once I Was Cool, an essay collection. Her work appears in Best American Essays 2013, the Rumpus, [PANK], and elsewhere. She is the literary director of the critically-acclaimed 2nd Story storytelling series and teaches creative writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Jamie Iredell is the author of The Book of Freaks, Prose. Poems. a Novel., and I Was a Fat Drunk Catholic School Insomniac. His writing has appeared in the Rumpus, the Good Men Project magazine, the Literary Review, [PANK], and Copper Nickel.

Wendy C. Ortiz is the author of Excavation: A Memoir and Hollywood Notebook. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, The Nervous Breakdown, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Rumpus, Brain, Child, & other journals.

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February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center