F160. Telling Stories About Your Hometown

Room L100 B&C, Lower Level
Friday, April 10, 2015
10:30 am to 11:45 am

 

Five authors discuss the challenges in writing fiction based in one's hometown (whether home is a small town or a city). How do you embrace or avoid nostalgia? How do you fictionalize facts without losing authenticity of place? How do you use a specific landscape to create the alternate hometown of your imagination? What are the implications of writing in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson, Carson McCullers, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez? Are some hometowns better suited to fiction than others?


Participants

Moderator:

Rene Steinke is the author of the novels, Friendswood, Holy Skirts (a 2005 National Book Award finalist), and The Fires. She is the former editor of the Literary Review, where she is now editor-at-large. She directs the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Eric Charles May is author of the novel Bedrock Faith and an associate professor in the fiction writing program at Columbia College Chicago. A former reporter for The Washington Post, his fiction has appeared in Solstice, Fish Stories, F, Hypertext, and Criminal Class. 

 

David Grand is a novelist who teaches workshops in fiction at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He is the author of three novels: LouseThe Disappearing Body, and Mount Terminus.

Elizabeth Gaffney is the author of the novels Metropolis and When the World Was Young, and the forthcoming short story collection Little Monsters. She is the editor at large of A Public Space and teaches writing at the New School, New York University, and Columbia University. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines.

Christine Rice is an author, editor, blogger, and teacher who lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center