F286. There's No "I" in "We": Writing Creative Nonfiction About the Groups We Belong To

Room 502 B, LA Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Friday, April 1, 2016
4:30 pm to 5:45 pm

 

We all belong to groups. When we write creative nonfiction about our family, race, religion, gender, sexuality, generation, or industry, many of us struggle to balance and maintain our own first-person voice within a story that might be shared by many different people. Four writers who have navigated the tug of war between the "I" and the "We," of various groups, discuss how to successfully write first-person narratives that tell more than just one's own story.


Participants

Moderator:

Maggie Mertens is a freelance writer and journalist in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in Glamour, Creative Nonfiction, Pacific Standard, the Atlantic, and NPR.org, among others. Maggie is working on a book about the Millennial search for the American Dream in a post-Recession world.

Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir, The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margarett Sargent by Her Granddaughter, and of three volumes of poems, Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She coordinates nonfiction and teaches in the New School graduate writing program.

Huan Hsu the author of The Porcelain Thief: Searching the Middle Kingdom for Buried China. He teaches journalism and creative writing at Amsterdam University College in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Ainsley McWha writes nonfiction, freelances for a local magazine, and works as a community-based counselor. Her MFA in creative nonfiction is from The New School.

Elissa Washuta, a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe, is the author of a memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules. She serves as adviser for the Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Washington and faculty for the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

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