An Evening Celebrating the Literary Genre of the Memoir
An Evening Celebrating the Literary Genre of the Memoir, with Moderator: Madeleine Blais and Panelists Carole Gaunt and John Hanson Mitchell. The General Book Department of the University Store at the University of Massachusetts will host an evening devoted to the literary genre of the memoir. The event is free and is open to the public and to members of the five-college community.
Acting as moderator for the event will be Madeleine Blais, recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for her feature writing for The Miami Herald’s Tropic Magazine, and member of the English faculty at the University of Massachusetts since 1987. She is the author of three distinguished books. The Heart Is an Instrument: Portraits in Journalism (The University of Massachusetts Press, 1992) collects her Pulitzer-winning feature articles. With In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle (Warner Books, 1996), she evocatively chronicles the state championship of the Amherst High School girl’s basketball team during their 1992-93 season.
In her most recent book, Uphill Walkers: Memoir of a Family (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2002), Anita Shreve has written that: "I can’t remember having read a memoir in which I’ve trusted the writer as much, or been as charmed." Blais, who was a finalist for The National Book Critics Circle Award in non-fiction for In These Girls, Hope Is a Muscle, was the recipient of The Chancellor’s Medal in 2001, the highest honor to be awarded to an individual for "exemplary and extraordinary service" to the University.
The panelists for the evening include Carole Gaunt, a UMass alum, who is the author of Hungry Hill: A Memoir (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), and John Hanson Mitchell, the editor of Sanctuary: The Massachusetts Audubon Magazine, who has recently published his memoir entitled The Rose Café: Love and War in Corsica (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007). Gaunt, also an award-winning playwright, documents her life growing up in Springfield’s "Hungry Hill," an Irish-Catholic working-class neighborhood, in the late fifties and early sixties. With the death of her mother, Betty O’Malley, from lymphatic cancer, in June 1959, Gaunt inherited an alcoholic father and seven younger brothers, aged two to fifteen. Only in early adolescence at that time, the weight of managing the family was placed on her shoulders.
John Hanson Mitchell, winner of the 1994 John Burroughs Essay Award, has concentrated much of his work on a single square mile tract of land known as Scratch Flat, located 35 miles northwest of Boston. He has written four books dealing with the natural and human history of the tract, the best known of which is Ceremonial Time (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), a fifteen thousand-year history of the area. In 2000, he was honored with the New England Booksellers’ Award in Non-Fiction for the entire body of his work.