Writing My Life: Upcoming Talk

In a few weeks, on Tuesday, February 10, 7:30 PM, I'll be participating in the Tredyffrin Public Library Grand Opening Event with a talk called "Writing My Life." With my own photographs as my stage, I'll be musing about the ways my perspective and stories are shaped by the life I live (in a tiny house) on the storied Main Line. Ghosts in the Garden, a memoir, erupted from Chanticleer, of course, but so did Nothing but Ghosts, the young adult novel due out in June. Seeing Past Z, my memoir about teaching young souls the power of stories and words, is saturated with the regional and personal. Undercover was inspired in part by my years at Radnor High School, House of Dance takes place in a modified Ardmore, down the road, and the first long act of The Heart is Not a Size (due out next winter), is touched by the world in which I live. Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River and Forgiveness, that much-discussed novel-in-progress, are both born of the tactile pulse and power of my city, Philadelphia.

I have always loved my home. I have always turned toward it. But this will be the first time that I will be thinking out loud about how my facts conspire with my fiction, or, simply, with language itself.

I hope you'll join me, if you can.