Marginalia: an autobiography

Please join Naomi Washer at Clio's to celebrate the release of Marginalia: an autobiography, in which the author gathers her own marginalia, collected from a decade's worth of reading and note taking, and recasts it into an essay that interrogates the activity of writing in the margins and what it reveals about the self.

Washer, a writer and psychoanalyst in training at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City, will be joined by Alice Jones, a poet and practicing psychoanalyst in Berkeley and a training and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. Washer and Jones will explore the means by which we preserve, discover, and uncover our sense of self through the acts of reading, re-reading, and re-considering the notes we leave in the margins. Taking a psychoanalytic point of view on the complex relationship of time to the development of the self, their conversation will draw on their experiences at the intersection of writing and psychoanalysis to highlight the ways in which we hide ourselves from ourselves, and how the act of writing and the analyst's presence can revive our voice.

Naomi Washer is a writer and psychoanalyst in formation in New York City. Her newest book is Marginalia: an autobiography (Autofocus Books, 2025) and her novel, Subjects We Left Out, was published by Veliz Books in 2021. She has published several chapbooks across genre, and other work has appeared in Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Essay Daily, Seneca Review, and Asymptote, among other journals and anthologies. She is the Editor of "Extra-Analytic: Creative Readings," a column on the psychoanalytic process of reading for Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

Alice Jones’s collections of poetry from Alice James Books are The Knot, which won the Beatrice Hawley Award, and Isthmus,winner of the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award. Extreme Directions (The fifty four moves of Tai Chi Sword) was published by Omnidawn Press. Poetry from Apogee Press includes Gorgeous Mourning, Plunge, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, and Vault. Poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Verse, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, and in anthologies including Best American Poetry; Blood and Bone: Poems by Doctors; and Verse and Universe: Poems about Science. Awards include fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the National Endowment for the Arts, the First Annual Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize, and the Robert H. Winner and Lyric Poetry Awards from the Poetry Society of America. After training in Internal Medicine, she completed a second residency in Psychiatry. She now practices Psychoanalysis in Berkeley and is a personal and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.

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