Photo Credit from L-R: Ada Calhoun by Laurel Golio, Alice Carrière by Sebastian Piras, Kelly McMasters by Sylvie Rosokoff,
Jill Bialosky by Beowulf Sheehan
Tickets
Members: $10
Non-Members: $20
Linked by their intimate lives with artists, Ada Calhoun, Alice Carrière, and Kelly McMasters come together as a roundtable panel to discuss the art of memoir writing, and to weave together experiential portraits of the intricacies of art, love, and introspection. Join us at The Church, as poet and best-selling author/memoirist Jill Bialosky, author of the acclaimed novel, The Deceptions, a novel about art, moderates the beautiful panel of esteemed writers. This event is preceded by a workshop on memoir writing led by Ada Calhoun on Saturday, September 16th. More information about the Workshop can be found here.
Ada Calhoun, daughter of American art critic and poet, Peter Schjeldahl, invites readers to join her on the journey of grappling to understand her father as she finishes a biography on Frank O’Hara that Schjeldahl abandoned in the 1970s. Named one of the best books of 2022 by The Washington Post, NPR, and Oprah Daily, Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me tells the kaleidoscopic story of a daughter finding herself and her father, through the bond of their shared medium, writing.
Alice Carrière, daughter of American painter Jennifer Bartlett and charismatic European actor Mathieu Carrière, tells the story of her unconventional upbringing in Greenwich Village. Alice is a child living in an adult’s world devoid of boundaries and supervision. In adolescence, she begins to lose her grasp on herself, as a dissociative disorder erases her identity and overzealous doctors medicate her away from herself. In Everything/Nothing/Someone Carrière manages to untangle the stories told to her by her parents, the American psychiatric complex, and her own broken mind to create a mesmerizing narrative of emergence and, finally, cure.
Kelly McMasters invites readers into a different relationship with the art world, as a painter’s former partner and art model. Navigating marriage and motherhood, art and ambition, grief and nostalgia, and the ever-elusive concept of home, McMasters creates a beautiful portrait of the possibilities and limitations of life as an artist. The Leaving Season: A Memoir in Essays, McMasters invites readers to join her in the vulnerable act of exposing the difference between outside perspective versus inside reality.
ABOUT ADA CALHOUN
Ada Calhoun is the author of Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me. Previous books include The New York Times bestseller Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis, about the plight of Generation X women; a collection of essays on marriage, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and a four-hundred-year history of the street she grew up on, St. Marks Is Dead.
ABOUT ALICE CARRIÈRE
Alice Carrière is a graduate of Columbia University. This is her first book. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee and Amagansett, New York.
ABOUT KELLY McMASTERS
Kelly McMasters is the co-editor of the national bestseller Wanting: Women Writing About Desire and the author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From An Atomic Town, an Orion Book Award nominee. Her essays have appeared in the Atlantic, New York Times, Literary Hub, and more. She teaches writing at Hofstra University and lives on Long Island.
ABOUT JILL BIALOSKY
Jill Bialosky is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, Asylum, four novels, most recently, The Deceptions and a New York Times bestselling memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished life and Poetry Will Save Your Life: A Memoir. She is an Executive Editor and Vice President at W. W. Norton & Company.