Virtual Workshop: Writing Memoir
Event Details
Presented by The Chang School of Continuing Education
Join authors Laura Calder (Kitchen Bliss) and Beth Kaplan (Loose Woman) for a discussion and Q&A session on writing memoir!
Kitchen Bliss (Simon & Schuster)
During the years of the global pandemic, Laura Calder, like many home cooks, found herself being drawn into the kitchen and becoming reacquainted with the power that the room can have to restore us when the going gets tough. In Kitchen Bliss, she reflects on how and why the kitchen and the dining table have held such an important place in her life and indeed taught her about happiness.
Laura has spent her life considering the life-enhancing pleasures of food: cooking, eating, and feeding. The pandemic gave her a new sense of urgency to share what she has learned. She says, “Life isn’t always a candy shop of delights, pandemic or no pandemic. Often we find ourselves in uncomfortable places and we must learn to create sweetness for ourselves out of whatever it is we’ve got—and that sometimes can seem like nothing but a whole lot of lemons. Well, at least that’s a start! We all know where to find the lemons: in the kitchen.”
This is a delightfully entertaining book full of memories, insights, good advice, and humor that will inspire readers to get in the kitchen, tie on an apron, and discover their own form of kitchen bliss.
Loose Woman (Iguana Books)
The memoir Loose Woman: my odyssey from lost to found tells how a quasi-alcoholic actor came to spend four astonishing months living and working among men with severe disabilities at a L’Arche community in Provence, and how the experience opened her heart and transformed her life.
The book brings to life the late seventies, when feminism and sexual liberation were ascendant, and a single woman had to come to terms with what this new kind of freedom meant. It gives a backstage view of the triumphs and miseries of a successful actor, celebrates daily life in France — tradition, argument, cheese — and shows a daughter struggling to emerge from the shadow of her powerful, flawed parents.
Loose Woman illuminates how, with the help of six damaged Frenchmen, a gifted, damaged young woman begins, at last, to trust and forgive herself, to live loosely, and to set off in a surprising new direction.
Partners
Presented by The Chang School of Continuing Education
