July 16, 2025
The Center for Fiction was thrilled to welcome Elissa Altman, award-winning author of Motherland and Poor Man’s Feast, to discuss her latest book, Permission, an illuminating examination of the craft of memoir writing. Altman’s latest work highlights strategies to take ownership of your ideas and transcend the fear that keeps your stories from being written.
Join Altman and memoirists Wendy C. Ortiz (Excavation) and Emily Bernard (Black is the Body) for a masterclass on memoir, the concept of permission as it applies to both fiction and nonfiction, and the elephant in almost every writer’s room: how to tell the stories that matter most to them, despite the voices telling them to stay silent.
Featured Book
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Permission
By Elissa Altman
Published by David R. Godine, Publisher
Without fail, almost every writer—new or experienced—has faced dire questions of permission and story ownership: there is something that they want to write about, that they need to write about. Yet: they can’t. They have been warned not to. They might be paralyzed with shame, threatened with shunning, chastened into silence. Even if what they need to write about has defined them and their worldviews.
But what if they did? What if you did?
After writing three critically acclaimed memoirs and a decade of teaching memoir workshops at every level, Elissa Altman has helped students face the elephant in every writer’s room: how to craft the stories that are most vital to them despite the voices that have told them not to. Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you’ve been told you can’t, and how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.
We are the storytelling species; this book will inspire and guide all creatives to a place of transformation, of freedom from the constraints of shame and fear in all their forms, and to the understanding and recognition of the ethics of story-making, art-making, truth-telling, and creative soul-saving.
Featuring
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Elissa Altman
Elissa Altman
Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man’s Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name. A longtime editor, she has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, the Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year. Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theater in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publishers, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond, and lives in Connecticut with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.
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Wendy C. Ortiz
Wendy C. Ortiz
Wendy C. Ortiz is a writer of creative nonfiction who works in hybrid forms, essays, and memoir. She is the author of three books, all published by Northwestern University Press. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine online, Joyland, the New York Times, Pleiades, Fence, and many other journals. Ortiz is a therapist in private practice in Los Angeles.
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Emily Bernard
Emily Bernard
Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine, winner of the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black in White, published in 2012 by Yale University Press. A 2020 Andrew Carnegie fellow and a 2024-2025 fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, she is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont and the 2024-2025 Distinguished Scholar in Residence in the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University.
