THE UNRELIABLE PAST
About this Event
On the second day of The Rough Notes Festival, authors Jayne Anne Phillips, Francine Prose, and Amitava Kumar discuss memory—perhaps the most powerful source of creation we have as writers, as artists, and even as human beings—as a tool in their writing. “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” as Joan Didion pointed out in The White Album. The past—whether our own personal past or shared human experience—is the wellspring that we can constantly pump for inspiration, plot, emotion, and more. Yet memory is also notoriously unreliable, biased, and spotty. How can we make sense of memory as an ephemeral muse for our craft, and how can our craft best reflect the shifting dualities of memory in a way that makes for writing that is forever moving, changing, dynamic, and free?
ABOUT THE ROUGH NOTES FESTIVAL
Presented by Kinderhook Books, the three-day event is, at its core, a literary festival—but it also celebrates the craft of writing in all its forms: songwriting, stand-up comedy, screenwriting, art, design, and more.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
AMITAVA KUMAR
Amitava is the author of the novels My Beloved Life and Immigrant, Montana, as well as several other books of nonfiction and fiction. In 2016, Kumar was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship (General Nonfiction) as well as a Ford Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists. He lives in Poughkeepsie, where he is Helen D. Lockwood Professor of English at Vassar College.
JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS
Jayne Anne is the author of six novels. Night Watch was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2024. Her work has been a finalist once for the National Book Award and twice for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The recipient of Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, Howard, Bunting, and Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships, she is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
FRANCINE PROSE
Francine is the author of twenty-three works of fiction including the highly acclaimed Five Weeks in the Country; The Vixen; Mister Monkey; the New York Times bestseller Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932; A Changed Man, which won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; and Blue Angel, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her works of nonfiction include the highly praised 1974: A Personal History, Anne Frank: The Book, The Life, The Afterlife, and the New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, which has become a classic. Prose is the recipient of numerous grants and honors, including a Guggenheim and a Fulbright, a Director’s Fellow at the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
USD 19.28
