A lot of New Yorkers have their own recession story to tell, whether it’s from the past year, the past decade or the accumulation of a lifetime.During this year’s Memoir-a-thon, you will get to listen to the personal reflections and insights on how some writers have managed to survive, preserve their sanity and even have fun during hard times.
Brooklyn Reading Works presents the 4th annual Memoirathon on February 11 at 8 PM at the Old Stone House. Third Street & Fifth Avenue. $5 suggested donation includes wine and snacks.
Curator Branka Ruzak had this to say about this year’s theme:
“You’ll be amazed to discover just how resilient and resourceful people can be, while still managing to find humor, cause for reflection and even gratitude, in some of life’s most challenging situations. Whether you found the past year “the year you’d like to forget” or “the year of positive thinking”, you will be inspired and entertained by tonight’s lineup of writers who talk about infinitely new ways of being.”
SPECIAL TREAT: Artist Lori Nelson will bring her 100 Recession Stories plaques to tonight’s event. Read more about them here.
Here is a list of this year’s memoirists:
MARCO ACEVEDO
NELL BOESCHENSTEIN
JANET RAIFFA
NAVA RENEK
BETSY ROBINSON
BRENT SHEARER
DEBORAH SIEGEL
Guest Curator and Host:
BRANKA RUZAK A writer, producer and editor in commercial and corporate advertising, her own personal tales of recession began in the spring of 2001, when she was downsized and forced to go free-lance. This past year, she was most often found working at recession gigs that provided her with limited income, but an unlimited source of inspiration and writing material. She is working on a collection of essays about family, identity, culture and travel. Her essay “Hungry Heart” appears in the anthology Dirt: The Quirks, Habits, and Passions of Keeping House, edited by Mindy Lewis (Seal Press, 2009.)
MARCO ACEVEDO is a Brooklyn-based graphic designer. He takes partial blame for the state of UPS trucks today, and almost all the blame, with pride, for the current CARE International logo. As the culture shifts ever further to image-based communication, he perversely resolves to “use his words” — a few more each day. His blog about American visual culture “I Only Look at the Pictures,” appears in Open Salon. His name, he swears, has occasionally appeared above Joe Conason’s on the Salon home page. He lives in Park Slope with his wife, writer Deborah Siegel, and their brand new twins.
NELL BOESCHENSTEIN is working towards her MFA in Nonfiction Writing at Columbia University. Her essays have appeared on The Morning News and The Rumpus. Her journalism has appeared in numerous alt-weeklies and regional magazines.
JANET RAIFFA is a Recruiter and Recruiting Manager with over fifteen years of experience hiring undergraduates, MBAs, and lawyers. She most recently served as the Director of Legal Recruiting at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe and prior to that spent nine years at Goldman Sachs in the firm’s offices in New York, New Jersey, London, and Bangalore, India. Since getting laid off in March of 2009 she was been blogging about unemployment at www.the405club.com <http://www.the405club.com> and taking a huge number of odd jobs to stay busy and somewhat sane. These include babysitting, bird-sitting, petitioning for political candidates, casting a reality television show, working sample sales, doing extra work on “Law and Order,” and coaching MBA students at Columbia, Wharton, and Yale. She has also commented on unemployment and the travails of the laid off for a wide variety of newspapers and programs globally. Janet holds a B.A. in English from Dartmouth College and an M.A. in American Studies from Columbia University, and is still figuring out what to do with an English degree three decades after receiving it.
NAVA RENEK is a writer, editor, and educator. Her short stories and essays can be found in literary magazines and websites such as The MacGuffin, Zone 3, The Brooklyn Rail, mrbellersneighborhood <http://www.mrbellersneighborhood/> , More.com, Respiro, among others. Her first novel, Spiritland, was published in 2002. She is also the editor of Wreckage of Reason: Anthology of XXperimental Prose By Contemporary Women Writers (2008). Her new novel, No Perfect Words was recently published by Brooklyn-based small press Spuyten Duyvil. She lives in Brooklyn where she is program coordinator of the Women’s Center at Brooklyn College.
BETSY ROBINSON For six and one-half years, until the recession exploded, Betsy Robinson was managing editor of a spiritual magazine, which will remain nameless. She is also a playwright and a fiction writer with one published novel called “Plan Z by Leslie Kove” and two unpublished novels. Her piece tonight was originally written for her blog, “Notes from a Crusty Spiritual Seeker” at www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
BRENT SHEARER is the book critic for Long Island Tennis magazine. He is a student in the low residency, high Baltika beer consumption MFA program at the East Village’s KGB bar. His memoir “In the Front Row, On the Dole” is one of the first books that combines lay-off lit with that more traditional memoiristic genre, getting laid lit.
DEBORAH SIEGEL, PhD is an expert on gender, politics, and the unfinished business of feminism across generations. She is the author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild, co-editor of the literary anthology Only Child: Writers on the Singular Joys and Solitary Sorrows of Growing Up Solo, founder of the blog Girl w/Pen, and co-founder of the webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online. Her writings on women, feminism, contemporary families, sex, and popular culture have appeared in venues including The Washington Post, The Guardian, Slate’s The Big Money, Recessionwire (where she penned the popular Love in the Time of Layoff column), The Huffington Post, The American Prospect, More, Psychology Today, and The Mothers Movement Online. A graduate of the first class of the Women’s Media Center’s Progressive Women’s Voices program, a Fellow at the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, and a Board Member of the Council on Contemporary Families, she is a frequent media commentator and lectures at campuses and conferences nationwide. She is VP-at-Large of She Writes.