Who am I to tell my story? And how can we permit ourselves to write the stories we’re compelled to tell when we’ve been told we shouldn’t?

After writing three critically-acclaimed memoirs and a decade of teaching memoir workshops at every level, Elissa Altman has helped students face the elephant in every writer’s room: how to craft the stories that are most vital to them despite the voices that have told them not to. Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you’ve been told you can’t, and to how to permit yourself to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of the new hybrid memoir, Permission: The New Memoirist and The Courage to Create, the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, Poor Man’s Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize in essay and has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize. Her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and The Washington Post. She teaches the craft of memoir widely and lives in New England with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.

Sari Botton is the author of the memoir-in-essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Land, and Adventures in Journalism.

Time: 8:00-9:00 pm EST

Free!

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