October Reading Series Recap
ICYMI, it was pretty wonderful.
Announcements:
Virtual write-ins are back! Every other Sunday at 5:30pm EST on Zoom. Become a monthly paid member now to support the work we do here and to participate in these write-ins!
We are also open for submissions for the first time until the end of this month for annual subscribers. Now is a great time to upgrade your subscription and get involved with this community! Learn all the details here.
In case you missed it, last Tuesday was the second to last Must Love Memoir event of the year. We had another amazing line-up of writers show up to share their work with an eager audience. There was so much appreciation in the room for nonfiction, making it one of the most lovely nights of chatting with authors and hearing their stellar readings.
Starting the night off strong was Samantha Hernandez. Samantha, a poet, writes prose like a poet, and I (Hope) found her voice and reading lyrical and lilting. She admits to “excessive journaling” and read a compilation of journal entries reminiscent of a lyric essay. She wrote about poet Bernadette Mayer, and Pete, a boyfriend whose “laugh is like a thunder clap.”
She wrote of going to therapy but never remembering which button to push to be buzzed into the building. She wrote of spitting in mouths, her friend Ceci, being sober, and a conversation with her father. “Time is a luxury,” she wrote, a luxury we wish we had more of so we could hear more of Samantha’s work!
Second up was Krystal Marie Orwig herself. She read from her memoir-in-progress, sharing the chapter that takes place before she left California to travel around Europe with a friend, and then move to New York City. She read about the human desire of wanting to leave a reminder of ourselves, a mark that we were there.
She wrote that a mother’s “magnetic pull” to check on the well-being of her child, was broken in her own mother. Krystal questioned and wondered the what-could-have-been and what-might-have-been, had she had a different childhood. Fittingly, the chapter ends with Krystal boarding an airplane.
Wendy Barnes, also a poet with a published full-length volume of poems, took the mic next. Her memoir-in-progress examines a relationship with a spouse who had a major illness. Being his caretaker led her to search for herself and eventually find herself.
In the section Wendy read, her husband is intubated in the ICU after major cancer surgery, in an induced coma. Taking Covid precautions because it was 2020, wearing hospital booties and other visitor protective gear, she examines being called a wife, and why she finds the label of “wife” a distasteful one. Like Samantha, Wendy’s poetic words had the audience’s attention captured.
After a short break, Stephanie Davies read. First, she read from her published memoir Other Girls Like Me. In the section she shared, she was living outside a US military base in the UK, to protest nuclear war. She had only recently come out and had a crush on a woman named Al. She was left with the question, Should she abandon Allison for Al?
Stephanie also gave us a sneak peek of her memoir-in-progress, set in New York in the 90’s during the height of the AIDS crisis. She wrote poignantly and powerfully about loss and grief and had the audience nodding with sympathy for the pain of those lost to AIDS.
Next up was Jonathan Corcoran, reading from his recently-published memoir No Son of Mine. In the book, his mother disowns him for being gay, and he’s working through her death after having been estranged from her for many years.
In the section he read, Jonathan is a young first-generation college student at Brown, hailing from West Virginia. He wrote beautifully of what home and heritage mean. After being told not to come back home, home lost its meaning. He felt like “an orphan at twenty-one years old.” He wrote of wanting to hold on to the things he knew and loved as a child, while also searching for a new sense of home.
Bringing us to a close was Aurora Wells, who moved to New York City to try to make it as a writer but found she needed more finances. Reading from her memoir-in-progress, which she promises to be “BDSM-heavy”, she wrote of working as a dominatrix and having a four-hour session with a man named Michael. Aurora examines sexuality and power dynamics. She connects her sexual encounter with Michael, with her fear of diving into water.
We can not thank you the people who showed up on a Tuesday night to support the series and our readers enough. There is no way we could keep doing this if you didn’t keep filling the seats at Jake’s Dilemma. And a big thank you to the readers, who gave their time and energy to us, and who shared so vulnerably.
And with all that said, you will want to mark Tuesday, November 12 on your calendars because it will be the last Must Love Memoir of the year. We promise it won’t disappoint, so come help us end the year strong.
Finally, don’t forget that during the month of October, we are accepting submissions to be a reader for annual subscribers (which is 50% off all month). If you want to see your own name in this newsletter early next year, you can head to this post to learn more.
