Creative Process: Crafting Memoir
Go inside the creative process—and deep into the craft of memoir—with three contemporary memoirists at three stages of their writing projects, Melisse Gelula founder of Memoiring will be joined by Hyeseung Song author of Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (July 2024) and Joseph Earl Thomas author of Sink: A Memoir which was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Learn how these authors shaped their lives into a narrative that reads like a novel, how they each transformed themselves (and their families) into characters, and what challenges and mistakes they faced along the way. Join us for a candid, behind-the-scenes conversation on their journey from idea and draft to book publication and beyond.
Presented in association with Memoiring, and Radio Catskill.
Artwork by Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung Song
Hyeseung is the author of the soon to be published Docile: Memoirs of a Not-So-Perfect Asian Girl (July 2024) Born in Seoul, South Korea, Song grew up in Texas and studied philosophy at Princeton and Harvard Universities. In her mid-twenties, she returned to her childhood passion of art, leaving academia to pursue painting at the Water Street Atelier, now the Grand Central Atelier, in New York City. Song has taught at Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Queens Council on the Arts’ High School 2 Art School Program as well as the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, She has received residencies at The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico, the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Program for Artists in Brittany, France, Penland School of Arts and Craft, the Vermont Studio Center as well as others, and her work resides in private collections internationally.
Song lives in Brooklyn and upstate New York.
Melisse Gelula
Melisse is the co-founder of Well+Good, an award-winning media company, and the founder of Memoiring, a book club and writing community that hosts memoirists such as Melissa Febos and Margo Steines for discussions and workshops. She has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College and is currently writing a memoir about being raised by a child psychologist who starts to hear voices. Melisse’s work and expertise has been featured in dozens of outlets, including the New York Times, Vogue, and Electric Literature. She lives in Narrowsburg, NY. You can follow her on Instagram @MelisseJoy and @Memoir_ing
Joseph Earl Thomas
Joseph Earl Thomas is the author of Sink: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2022), longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, the forthcoming novel God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer (Grand Central Publishing, 2024), and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central, 2025). His writing has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. His honors include the 2020 Chautauqua Janus Prize, and fellowships from Kimbilio, VONA, Tin House and Bread Loaf. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, he is earning a PhD in English at The University of Pennsylvania. He is also a member of the writing faculty at Sarah Lawrence College, and teaches courses in Black Studies, Poetics, Video Games, Queer Theory and more at The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.