Jenn Shapland - My Autobiography of Carson McCullers
Monday, Feb 10, 2020 7:00 PM
Location:
Oglethorpe University Museum of Art
4 Lowry Hall, 3rd Floor, 4484 Peachtree Rd NE, Atlanta, GA 30319
In genre-defying vignettes, author Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers, and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are.
Shapland will appear in conversation with Atlanta’s own Jessica Handler, author of “The Magnetic Girl.”
This event is free and open to the public.
If you are unable to attend, you may pre-order a signed copy of the book for pick-up in-store or delivery below:
About the Book
While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.
And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake a recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life: she wades through the therapy transcripts; she stays at McCullers’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives McCullers’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and McCullers, she sees how McCullers’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life, but about the way we tell queer love stories.
About the Author
Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, Outside, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers” is her first book.