CityLit Festival presents: Writing, Revising, & Editing YOUR Story with Matt Bell, Melissa Febos, Dean Smith, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, and CityLit Project’s Aditya Desai as moderator

The Writer’s Room with Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai will follow the main session from 8:30 – 9:00 pm.

Some of the nation’s literary finest discuss revision, editing, the bold undertaking of writing the body through trauma and desire, and all things writing in a 90-minute craft intensive. A poet, two novelists, a memoirist, offer a frank talk on craft and editing towards publication, a practical, layered approach to revision, the radical power of personal narrative, and writing as a form of freedom to write the story of our bodies. They will discuss the challenges of their own work, and step up the truth in their roles as writers, fear be damned. Novelist Matt Bell in his new work, Refuse to Be Done, deemed a bible for the revision process, offers sage advice about attentiveness, and an appreciation for the often overlooked. Girlhood’s Melissa Febos sparks a chord in Body Work, drawing on her own journey through addiction and recovery, what it means to write the intimate, ‘confessional’ story, and find your own liberation. The history of a place with language that balances “witness and wound,” publisher and poet Dean Bartoli Smith’s Baltimore Sons grounds us in the all too familiar place of “life-class, race and violence.” Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel in English, The Mountains Sing, which NPR called “a song of many voices”, a familial exploration told through the lens of how personal memories write the history of a moment, and who of us can say otherwise. Any one of these authors could offer their own master class in penning a tale of life as we know it. A not-to-be-missed event.