Exhuming the Skeletons in the Closet: The Ethics of Writing About Family (NeMLA)
virtual
Organization: NeMLA
Event: NeMLA
How do we tell those family stories that make us feel vulnerable, that expose the parts of our history that might better be forgotten, or that open the door to the closet and allow the skeletons to come tumbling out? As Joy Castro writes in Family Trouble, “Ethical memoirists write in order to see, to understand, to come to terms with wounds.” This notion can extend past memoir to any genre in which the writer is interested in exploring families, whether to reveal the unvarnished “truth,” to create strong characters, or to help readers make meaningful connections with the material.
Across genres, we often use lived experience to interrogate our ideas about the world. This panel seeks to explore the ways in which writers can respect our pasts, navigating tricky questions about secrecy, honesty, complacency, and cruelty.
The session seeks submissions in all creative genres (fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid). Readings of creative work will be followed by a robust discussion with panelists and audience members about the ways in which we can ethically and responsibly tell our stories. The Q&A will also be open to conversations about how we can help students to navigate this kind of writing and workshopping in the composition and creative writing classrooms.
The session will be held entirely remotely via the Northeast Modern Languages Association (NeMLA) conference, over Zoom.
Elizabeth Bolton