F203. Looking Outward: Avoiding the Conventional Memoir

Marquis Salon 5, Marriott Marquis, Meeting Level Two
Friday, February 10, 2017
1:30 pm to 2:45 pm

All too often, memoir falls into a familiar, conventional pattern of confession and redemption. But how do you tell a personal story when life doesn’t conform to that shape? And how can a writer with a variety of interests incorporate those subjects into a personal narrative? Three Graywolf Press nonfiction authors discuss their approaches to writing about life—and subjects as disparate as infertility, nature, friendship, science, grief, and art—in personal and intimate detail.

Participants

Moderator:

Steve Woodward is associate editor at Graywolf Press. He has an MFA from the University of Michigan and teaches at Sierra Nevada College.

Paul Lisicky is the author of five books including The Narrow Door, Unbuilt Projects, and The Burning House. A 2016 Guggenheim fellow, he teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden and serves on the Writing Committee of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Belle Boggs is the author of Mattaponi Queen and The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood. She teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University.

Angela Palm is the author of Riverine: A Memoir from Anywhere but Here, an Indie Next selection and winner of the 2014 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize. Palm was awarded a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellowship in nonfiction. She is a freelance editor and lives in Vermont.

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F203. Looking Outward: Avoiding the Conventional Memoir

Participants