Join memoirist Julia Munemo and novelist Ellen Meeropol as they explore the pleasures and perils of using fraught family history in creative writing.

About the authors:

Ellen is the author of the novels Her Sister’s Tattoo, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island, and House Arrest. A literary late bloomer, Ellen began seriously writing fiction in her fifties, but her first publications came much earlier. At age twelve, her essay, “I am a Square Dance Orphan,” was published in a national square dance magazine and she wrote a monthly feature column for her high school newspaper in the Washington, D.C. area. Ellen studied art at Earlham College and the University of Michigan and received her MFA in fiction from the Stonecoast MFA program.

Julia McKenzie Munemo is the author of the memoir The Book Keeper. She went to Bard College before earning a master’s in education at Harvard. After building a career as a freelance writer, she earned an MFA in creative nonfiction from the Stonecoast Program at the University of Southern Maine.

An excerpt from The Book Keeper won the 2016 Bridging the Gap Competition for nonfiction at the Slice Literary Writers’ Conference. She was a fellow at the Williams College Oakley Center for Humanities, was selected as the nonfiction reader for the Stonecoast MFA Alumni Reunion in 2017, and was the Stonecoast alumni teaching assistant in 2018.

She works as a freelance writer and editor and teaches courses in creative nonfiction.