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An illuminating conversation on the relationship between gothic narratives, fictional monsters, and the history of American slavery, featuring the Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James in conversation with Leila Taylor, author of  Darkly: Blackness and the America's Gothic Soul, in which she synthesize her personal memoir with American history and cultural analysis to brilliant effect. 

Leila Taylor, graphic designer and Creative Director at the Brooklyn Public Library, grew up identifying as that rare person: a Black Goth. Her book, Darkly, is an ode to Goth sensibility, and  a meditation on Blackness and how America's sordid history has found expression in gothic narratives.  

Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. His most recent novel, Moon Witch, Spider King is the critically-acclaimed follow-up to Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a New York Times bestseller, that draws on  African history and mythology. 

From Sappho on, writers have often felt compelled to write in the first person about their own experiences. But in the modern era, the memoir has rarely been as popular as it is today, perhaps because it gives visibility to experiences that have so often been shut out of the literary space. For this panel, three memoirists with recent or upcoming memoirs discuss how they turned their own lives into art, and why our confessional culture shows no sign of slowing down. 

Panel

Joyce Maynard has written ten novels, including To Die For and Labor Day (both turned into acclaimed movies) and, most recently, Count the Ways, an epic portrait of an American family over four decades as it navigates a devastating accident against the backdrop of historical events and shifting  social attitudes. Maynard’s 2017 memoir, The Best of Us, tells the agonizing story of her second husband’s battle with pancreatic cancer, but she is best known for her 1998 memoir, At Home in the World, in which she wrote about her teenage relationship with J.D. Salinger.

Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House, April 2022), has been called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, and more. Maud grew up in Miami and has degrees in English and law. 

Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, forthcoming from Random House, and the poetry collection Un-American, which was an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, The Believer, and The Paris Review, among many others.  

Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry, among others. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The New School, where she served as the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. For twenty-one years Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens. Her new memoir, This Body I Wore, is published by FSG. 

Melisse Gelula (moderator) is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of the media company Well+Good. With a career that spans digital, magazines, and book publishing (Random House), she's written for dozens of lifestyle outlets and been quoted in the New York Times, Fast Company, and more. Melisse has degrees in literature and studied psychoanalysis for 6 years. She's currently writing a mental-health memoir and begins an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College this fall.

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. For Deep Water Literary Fest she reads from her work, and discussed the art of horror with A.M.Homes, the author of the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know, The Safety of Objects, and Days of Awe. 

William Wegman may be best known for his Weimaraners—which have flexed their manicured paws from art galleries to the set of Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street–but dogs are only part of the artist’s oeuvre. In Writing by Artist, his latest book–and accompanying show–we get a glimpse into his playful and often impish texts, including imagined restaurant reviews, musings on ancient footwear, reworked greeting cards, and fictional advertisements for real life products, among other things. For this appearance at Deep Water Literary Fest, Wegman talks about his life and work with Andrew Lambert, editor of Writing by Artist.

Krause Hall, DVAA, 37 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY 

Director Conor Kelly O'Brien has adapted Mary Shelly's novel to stage a reckoning between Dr. Frankenstein and his creature. Don't miss this absorbing theatrical event featuring five acclaimed actors and the a specially-created soundscape by Manon Manavit.

In March and April 2022, the Ukrainian writer  Ostap Slyvynksy began to document the stories of refugees he was assisting as they arrived in Lviv railway station from points east, north and south of Ukraine.  Like Milan Kundera-meets-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the stories have a quality of fable in which heartbreaking experiences are interspersed with moments of humor. Translated from the Ukrainian into English by Taras Malkovych, these stories will be presented by  actors,  residents of Narrowsburg, and some  (pre-recorded) guest readers including Tilda Swinton and Alan Cumming. Please join us in the beautiful setting of St. Paul's Lutheran Church for this beautiful presentation, directed by Gregory Triggs.

Elise Rasmussen  

“The Year Without a Summer" (pictured, above)

(16mm film transferred to 4K Video, 4 Channels of Sound, 20:05 mins , 2020)

Elise Rasmussen’s video is one part of a larger multimedia installation which took the Canadian artist to several continents investigating the circumstances both environmental and personal behind the creation of Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein. In 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia  erupted, wreaking a global climate disaster. The relentless rain of the summer of 1816 sequestered the young Mary Shelley and her companions on holiday at Lake Geneva and set her to pen the now infamous tale.  “The Year Without a Summer re-examines the effects of this environmental anomaly, finding parallels with our current climate crises, while intertwining diaristic accounts of Mary Shelley and her circle, Sumbawan folklore, and my own reflections traveling to the same volcano and lake during the hottest summer on record,” writes Elise Rasmussen.  "The Year Without a Summer." was originally mounted at Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB and was created with support from Canada Council for the Arts and La Becque Résidence d’Artistes. 

Sibyl Kempson / 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. 

The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.  (58.21 mins, 2020)

Originally conceived as a live performance set to premiere in New York in 2021, the pandemic saw the company ingeniously pivot to transform the work into digital form. Maery S is part animation featuring intricate hand cut collages, part radio play, and song cycle stitched together from performances created entirely in isolation.  “MAERY S….visually places us in the layered universe of our reinvented Frankenstein author…, suggesting as many versions of…Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic…A string of misfortunes – financial, maternal, and familial – causes Maery S. to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery can’t help falling in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.”  Created by and starring Dee Dorcas Beasnael, Chris Giarmo, Brian Mendes, Sibyl Kempson, Crystal Wei, Oceana James, Victor Morales Amanda Villalobos, Dan Hurlin, Eva von Schweinitz, Madeline Best, Jay Silver, Alex Albanese/Fun City Films, Erica-Lynn Huberty, Leonie Bell, Rebecca Frank, Stephanie Anuwe, and Stephanie Morales.  The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. was originally screened at The Chocolate Factory in collaboration with Abrons Arts Center and NYU Skirball.