Come Along To My Creative Meet-Up
It's that time of the month again...
It’s busy over here at White Ink at the moment, not only is my Summer School running where I am mentoring nine brilliant writers and enjoying very much getting to know them and their work, but last Sunday saw my first Feminist Essay Club launch. Catch up here if you haven’t already:
Feminist Essay Club #1
Tonight we gathered for my inaugural Feminist Essay Club where we kicked things off by discussing Hélène Cixous’ The Laugh of the Medusa.
And this coming Monday of course is our regular monthly meet up.
Phew!
In my own writing life, I am also spending the summer working on my memoir which must be finished by September, so you know, no rest for the wicked.
For this reason I’ll keep this post short but just to let you know that this month at my creative writing club we’ll be looking at autofiction. One of the reasons for this, not least because I am so intrigued by/love this genre, is because of this piece I wrote for you on Tuesday:
On What Would Have Been My 25th Wedding Anniversary...
On Saturday night, I was chatting with a lovely writer I had never met before, our books are along similar subjects — formidable women — but towards the end of our conversation, she said she had to ask:
It had a fictional element in it, this idea of the life I didn’t live, and so by my definition that fits into an ‘autofiction’ genre. But what exactly is autofiction? For some of us, it’s a work of fiction with that memoir element (see Death Valley by Melissa Broder), or a memoir with a fictional element (see Deborah Levy’s living memoir series). For others it’s autobiographical writing that opens up memoir into something more universal.
For some of us it’s a way of writing a truth about our lives but giving it that element of disguise and therefore offering some protection for the writer, both legal and emotional. For others it might be adding a magical realism strand to the story, Melissa Broder’s first novel was The Pisces where she explore her experiences of addiction by having a love affair with a merman. It might be playing with timelines, characters, settings, genres. Maybe it is whatever we want it to be, but might it offer us more flexibility in our writing?
I thought we could spend some time on Monday night having a deeper dive into this intriguing genre and, most importantly, seeing what playing within it could add to our own work in progress or ideas.
So, if you would like to join me around my dining room table, then here are all the details you need. We will meeting on Monday July 7th, at 7pm (London time - please do check as we are currently in BST which is GMT+1).
As always it’s an informal chat, all thoughts and opinions welcomed, just a lovely hour spent together with some lovely people talking about our favourite topic — books and writing.
If you would like to join then you will need to upgrade to paid:
And you will find the zoom details beyond this paywall. I do hope to see you there!