Friday, March 13, 2015

WRITING FROM THE FAMILY The Perils and Pleasures of Fictionalizing Your Family

TUES APRIL 14
7.30p.m.-9.00p.m.
Hamilton Room, Central Branch, Hamilton Public Library

Novelist and cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki explores the tradition of using family as your muse. Do you end up with more powerful, believable characters? Can you avoid cliche in the process? Will your parents ever speak to you again?
Suggested reading:
Please read the story
Sometime Next Sunrise by Hal Niedzviecki
from the short story collection Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened (city lights)
available free at
https://www.taddlecreekmag.com/sometime-next-sunrise
in advance of attending.
Please bring your own favourite examples of works by authors who are fictionalizing their real life families.

He is the author of eight books including the collection of short stories Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened (City Lights, April 2011) and the nonfiction book The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors (City Lights, 2009). The Peep Diaries was made into a television documentary entitled Peep Culture produced for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He is the current fiction editor and the founder/publisher of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and the independent arts, (Hal’s writing has appeared in newspapers, periodicals and journals across the world including the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian, Playboy, the Utne Reader, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Toronto Life, Walrus, Geist, and This Magazine. Niedzviecki is committed to exploring the human condition through provocative fiction and non-fiction that charts the media saturated terrain of ever shifting multiple identities at the heart of our fragmenting age.

Links:
Home page and blog: http://www.alongcametomorrow
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/HalNiedzvieckiwriter
Twitter: http://twitter.com/halpen
Magazine: http://www.brokenpencil.com