24PearlStreet Workshops and Events
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The Art of Navel Gazing: a Generative Seminar — LIVE via ZOOM: 12pm-2pm (Eastern) on June 22nd —
Do you suspect the most urgent story you have to tell is your own, but fear that writing a memoir is too vulnerable an undertaking? Do you fear being thought unserious or self-indulgent?
Too often we take for granted the false binary between the personal and the intellectual. A literary work’s aesthetic or intellectual merit does not preclude catharsis, nor concerns of domestic, corporeal, or “confessional” nature. Why shouldn’t a literary examination of the navel approach profound universalities, be intellectually astute, politically powerful, and aesthetically great?
In this seminar, we will take a long hard look into our own navels, write from places of intimate experience, interrogate our own inherited biases, and consider why personal writing might be exactly what we need right now. This two-hour seminar will provide a combination of lecture, discussion, generative exercises, and Q&A. There will be opportunities for sharing, but this is not a workshop and no feedback will be given.
Biography
Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Alfred A. Knopf. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, Lambda Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, the British Library, the Black Mountain Institute, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has recently appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Essays, and Vogue. Febos is a full professor at the University of Iowa, where she teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program.
