For folks who missed last week’s “Rediscovering Your Story” workshop with Garrard Conley, here’s the recording. It’s only up for a month so watch it soon!
It’s a perfect time for me to discuss this topic of going back through our lives over and over again because I gave a talk at my grad school alma mater Cornell late last week, and spent the weekend treading the old ground of my memories about that experience.
It’s funny that no matter how often it happens, I get convinced that I’ll always feel the same way about a place until I go back, when I realize that I have a completely different set of emotions compared to what I thought I would feel.
Grad school as a newly-transitioned, low-key stealth person was a fraught experience as you might imagine, and returning as an author and speaker brought up a lot of perspectives I wasn’t aware I had until I got there. I even got to go to an MFA program dinner party, which felt like entering a time machine and left me wistful in a way I would have never expected given how rocky those years were when I actually lived them.
This inspired a new prompt for myself, which I’m passing on to you this week: write about an experience from the recent past, and then write about it as you would imagine having that same experience ten years from now. Let’s all see what happens!
Talk soon,
M.
P.S. If you happen to be in New York, I’ll be at the Strand on Oct 17 celebrating the launch of Listening in the Dark, edited by Amber Tamblyn, who I hesitate to call “dear friend” because of all its connotations but is actually a dear friend and neighbor in the Catskills. We’ll be joined by America Ferrera and Ronan Farrow, which makes me feel like this ha ha. Tickets and deets HERE!