What drives the writer of personal narrative is often an impulse to speak where there has been silence. Early drafts may be guided by intuition, a gravitational pull towards what lies unresolved. And yet sooner or later, the work requires structure. This talk will address the process of finding a structure that isn’t merely an organizing principle, but rather calls forth theme and stakes, and how considering structure can help the writer crack through to deeper, riskier layers of meaning.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, named an Indie Next Pick; one of the most anticipated books of 2017 by Buzzfeed, BookRiot, and The Huffington Post; a must-read for May by Goodreads, Audible.com, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, and People; long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize and a finalist for a New England Book Award; and one of the 10 best books of the year so far by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, and BookRiot. It was published May 16 in the US and May 18 in the UK, to be followed by the Netherlands, Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Greece, and France. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, and a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Boston, where she teaches at Grub Street and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.