Author Event! Elissa Altman & Annabeth Gish

About the book:

Who am I to tell my story? And how can we grant ourselves permission to write the stories we’re compelled to tell when we've been told we shouldn't?

Without fail, almost every writer—new or experienced—has faced dire questions of permission and story ownership: there is something that they want to write about, that they need to write about. Yet: they can’t. They have been warned not to. They might be paralyzed with shame, threatened with shunning, chastened into silence. Even if what they need to write about has defined them and their worldviews.But what if they did? What if you did?

After writing three critically-acclaimed memoirs and a decade of teaching memoir workshops at every level, Elissa Altman has helped students face the elephant in every writer’s room: how to craft the stories that are most vital to them despite the voices that have told them not to. Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you’ve been told you can’t, and how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

We are the storytelling species; this book will inspire and guide all creatives to a place of transformation, of freedom from the constraints of shame and fear in all their forms, and to the understanding and recognition of the ethics of story-making, art-making, truth-telling, and creative soul-saving.

About the authors:

Elissa Altman is the author of the acclaimed Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create, an examination of the role that permission, story ownership, fear, and shame play in the creative process. She is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man's Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name. Altman is a winner of the James Beard Award for narrative food writing, a finalist for the Pushcart Prize, Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, "Feeding My Mother," ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, and lives in New England with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.

Annabeth Gish is a uniquely gifted and beloved actress with a diverse background in film and television dating back well over 40 years.

Gish first gained the attention of critics and moviegoers at the age of 13 in the feature film Desert Bloom with Jon Voight and Ellen Barkin. She went on to star in the acclaimed feature Mystic Pizza opposite Julia Roberts. Her expansive list of film credits include Double Jeopardy, SLC Punk; Hiding Out; Wyatt Earp; Nixon; Beautiful Girls and Shag; Gish’s past television credits include the hit series The West Wing, Pretty Little Liars, and her role as Monica Reyes in the iconic hit series The X-Files. She starred to great critical acclaim in the award-winning Showtime series Brotherhood. More recent credits include FX’s The Bridge and Sons of Anarchy; AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire and Mayfair Witches, as well as roles in the Netflix hit horror series, The Haunting of Hill House and Midnight Mas, and Paramount’s Lioness.

Gish is a graduate of Duke University. She currently resides in Los Angeles with her husband Wade Allen, and their two teenage sons Cash and Enzo.

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