Memoir as Alchemy: Making art out of personal stories: A panel discussion

510 Southwest 3rd Avenue,Portland OR 97204

13 October, 2021

Description

Writer Lilly Dancyger brings together fellow memoirists, Emilly Prado, Lois Ruskai Melina and Lidia Yuknavitch to discuss alchemy and art. Join us for an evening of readings and a discussion about the varietal ways to shape a personal story on the page—the transformative power of crafting the raw material of our lives into a piece of art that can reflect the writer, the reader, and the world we live in back to us. Four authors will share their work and then chat about the process, pitfalls, and discoveries of translating personal experience into story, and then getting that story out into the world. Moderated by Daniel Elder and hosted by Corporeal Writing. Lilly Dancyger is the author of Negative Space (2021), a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as a winner of the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards, and the editor of Burn It Down (2019), a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women's anger from Seal Press. Lilly is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. Her writing has been published by Guernica, Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Longreads, The Washington Post, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and she spends way too much time on twitter (where you can find her at @lillydancyger). Lois Ruskai Melina is a retired educator, avid rower, and passionate fan of women’s soccer. Her debut essay collection, The Grammar of Untold Stories, was published by Shanti Arts in 2020. In an earlier chapter of her life she was a journalist who specialized in writing about adoption. She’s currently working on a novel inspired by the French glassmaker Marguerite Huré. Lois lives in Portland with her husband and their two dogs. She has two grown children and two grandchildren. Emilly Prado is a writer and educator based in Portland, Oregon. When not writing or teaching, Emilly moonlights as DJ Mami Miami with Noche Libre, the Latinx DJ collective she co-founded in 2017. Her debut essay collection, Funeral for Flaca, was selected as #YosiBookClub summer reading pick and has been called, “Utterly vulnerable, bold, and unique,” by Ms. Magazine. Funeral for Flaca is out now with Future Tense Books and is available wherever books are sold. Learn more at www.emillyprado.com or on social media @emillygprado. Lidia Yuknavitch is the author the short story collection Verge (Riverhead Books), the novels The Book of Joan (Harper Books), The Small Backs of Children (Harper Books), and Dora: A Headcase (Hawthorne Books), and the anti-memoir The Chronology of Water (Hawthorne Books). Her TED Talk "On the Beauty of Being a Misfit" has received over 3 million views, and spawned The Misfit Manifesto (TED Books/Simon and Schuster). She lives and collaborates in Portland, Oregon at Corporeal Writing. She is a very good swimmer.