Friday, March 25 from 12:10pm-1:25pm ET, in person and online

with Alden Jones, Grace Talusan, and moderator Aggie Stewart

Trauma memoirs require careful emotional pacing, which means modulating the presentation of emotionally charged material. Emotional pacing involves decisions about which events to include, how to withhold or present details, and how to sequence events, often using narrative techniques to manipulate the distance between the narrator and events. In this panel, four memoirists offer strategies for guiding the reader’s experience in memoirs of near death, family secrets, and other difficult stories.

This session will start with a 10-minute presentation on the concept of emotional pacing. Following this presentation, panel participants will engage in a moderated, 50-minute discussion focused on how they emotionally paced their narratives to support the meaning they made of their experiences. The remaining 15 minutes will be devoted to Q&A with the audience.

If attending in person, join us at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, 100 Level, 113 C.

Please note that although the panel is convening in person, Katherine Standefer will be speaking virtually.

Alden Jones is the author of the books The Wanting Was a Wilderness, Unaccompanied Minors, and The Blind Masseuse. Her fiction and essays have appeared in BOMB, The Rumpus, The Cut, AGNI, and Best American Travel Writing. She teaches at Emerson College and the Newport MFA Program.

Grace Talusan is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University and her memoir, The Body Papers, won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction.

Aggie Stewart is a Rhode Island-based writer and a fourth semester student in the Newport MFA program at Salve University. Her MFA focus is creative nonfiction. She is currently writing a memoir about growing up in the shadow of her mother’s sister’s murder, a closely guarded family secret.

Katherine E. Standefer's debut book Lightning Flowers was a Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction and a NYT Book Review Editor's Choice/Staff Pick. Her writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. She lives in New Mexico on a mesa with her chickens.