Name: Context is Everything: Researching With, and For, Emotional Impact
Start: 2027-01-16T10:15:00-0500
End: 2027-01-16T11:15:00-0500

Context is Everything: Researching With, and For, Emotional Impact

Saturday January 16, 2027 10:15am - 11:15am EST

TBA

Writers of memoir are often asked to bring research to the page, to help the reader feel the largeness of a question beyond one life. Novelists, too, are likely to realize that research is needed somewhere along the way, to deepen their characters’ world. Yet writers of researched nonfiction are constantly asked to bring more of themselves to the page— to add characters and emotion, rather than research. Why this contradictory hunger and how is a writer to find their own path within it? What makes some research moments feel not only alive on the page but essential, while others can feel shoehorned-in or bone dry? Together, we’ll examine examples from books that successfully, even elegantly, toggle between research and memoir, examining what makes such moments feel organic and alive, and arrive at several considerations to spark our own thinking. While our examples will be drawn primarily from nonfiction, novelists who wish to traverse different vocal modes and poets in love with the inclusion of fact will find strategies here, too.

Speakers

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

THE FACT OF A BODY, Author

Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages and optioned for television. Their essays appear in the 2020 and 2022 editions... Read More →

Saturday January 16, 2027 10:15am - 11:15am EST
TBA

Track 5: Big Picture

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Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

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