Friday May 21 2021 at 5:30pm MT
In this free reading and conversation hosted by SOMOS of Taos, NM, Katherine Standefer and Alden Jones talk about structuring journey narratives, building honest and compelling narrators on the page, and teasing the meaning out of past experiences so that a book builds rather than plods. Alden Jones' new book The Wanting Was A Wilderness combines a critical look at Cheryl Strayed's Wild with Jones' own experiences on the trail. Katherine Standefer's debut memoir Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life tells the story of her troubled relationship to her own implanted cardiac defibrillator, following her harrowing journey through the American medical system and her global quest to understand what it takes to save one life.
Katherine Standefer is the author of Lightning Flowers: My Journey To Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life, which was a NYT Book Review Editor's Choice/Staff Pick. Named one of Oprah Magazine's Best Books of Fall 2020, Lightning Flowers was also shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, received a starred Kirkus review, and was featured in People Magazine, on NPR's Fresh Air, and on the goop podcast. Her writing appeared in The Best American Essays 2016. Standefer earned her MFA at the University of Arizona. She lives on a piñon- and juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico with her chickens.
Alden Jones is the author, most recently, of the hybrid memoir The Wanting Was a Wilderness. Her story collection Unaccompanied Minors won the New American Fiction Prize and was a finalist for a Publishing Triangle Award and a Lambda Literary Award, and her memoir The Blind Masseuse was named a notable travel book by National Geographic, Publishers Weekly, PEN America, and the Huffington Post. Her stories and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Agni, The Rumpus, and the Best American Travel Writing. She is core faculty in the Newport MFA, and also teaches creative writing and cultural studies at Emerson College in Boston.
