Super Special Memoiring Craft Class with Margo Steines
The February Book Club Author of BRUTALITIES joins us for a craft class and conversation about her new essay collection.
If you follow Memoir_ing on Instagram—where I almost always announce our book club picks first—you know that our February Book Club pick is BRUTALITIES: A LOVE STORY (WW Norton, Oct 2013) by Margo Steines, a buzzy new memoir in essays.
But what I didn’t say until now is that this month is a SPECIAL CRAFT CLASS EDITION OF MEMOIRING. Author Margo Steines will be leading a 30-minute craft class along with our regular conversation and author Q&A on February 26.
Zoom sign-up and all the details — plus a video from Margo — are below!
THE BOOK BUZZ
Why I picked this book: Steines’s debut is an intense and important collection from an essayist writing at the edge of what it means to live in a body. BRUTALITIES is emotionally demanding, gorgeously written, and not always easy. It aligns with the deeply intelligent and unflinching feminist work of acclaimed authors Melissa Febos and Leslie Jamison (who both endorsed BRUTALITIES). All three authors are fearless excavators of the shared unspoken.
The essays in BRUTALITIES orbit themes of pain and embodiment, as well as violence, desire, f*cked up relationships, pregnancy, fitness zealotry, the promise and failure of gender, and the ways we find (and are called to engage with) pain while living in the bodies we have.
As Tajja Isen shared in “Seven Books That Earn Your Tears” for The Atlantic, “Steines writes with unrelenting clarity about visceral bodily experiences… In between the episodes of pain, [she] learns to let herself feel softness; with great skill and control, she makes the reader submit to the same trajectory. The moments of gentleness feel like a caress that follows a slap, and their intensity is enough to make you break down.”
I’m so down for this.
WHY ARE WE SO LUCKY TO BE GETTING THIS SPECIAL CRAFT CLASS EDITION OF MEMOIRING?
I’ve learned that most of you have joined Memoiring because, like me, you’re writing personal essays and memoir—and you love book club convos to include LOTS of craft talk. Especially when the author joins us. So we’re making it extra official this month with Margo Steines, a creative writing instructor on the faculty of the University of Arizona Writing Program, who also offers private group workshops and one-on-one coaching.
SIGN UP RIGHT HERE!
MEMOIRING CRAFT CLASS + Q&A WITH AUTHOR MARGO STEINES
Monday, February 26 at 5:30-6:45pm ET on SIGN UP ON ZOOM
(Registration is required)
While payment is NOT REQUIRED to attend, this special craft class edition of Memoiring comes with a suggested pay-what-you-can link in your RSVP. All funds go directly to Margo.
Margo is so awesome — she recorded this video for us reading from the opening of her collection.
MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Margo Steines is a creative writer, working in literary nonfiction, with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of Arizona. She writes a hybrid of memoir, essay, cultural criticism, and immersion journalism. Her published creative work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Slate, Identity Theory, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthology Letter to a Stranger, and elsewhere. BRUTALITIES: A Love Story is her first book.
I’ve also got a old school, Zagat-style mashup of this impressively reviewed debut:
Steines “keep[s] her reader close, writing with a rare crystalline precision as she explores her fixation with violence and with certain forms of traditional masculinity.” NYTimes “From being a dominatrix to a welder, Steines meticulously describes the emotional toll of these jobs, deftly leading readers through several different stages of her life and how they all have informed her relationship with her body.” Shondaland Brutalities “is also a universal treatise on the things we do for pain and why we do them. It is deeply, deeply human, often uncomfortably so.” The Observer “...but this discomfort is tempered by her clearheaded insights and retroactive self-empathy." Kirkus Review
Get your copy of BRUTALITIES: A LOVE STORY from your local indie bookstore or library ASAP. Here’s the link to the Memoiring Bookshop.org page, too.
Got questions? Want more craft classes with authors? Use the Comments, below.
Thanks for reading, watching, and Memoiring! See you on Zoom (register here!), Melisse