About this Event
Lauren Westerfield reads from her new memoir, Woman House: Essays and Assemblages, a compelling and inventive memoir exploring how pain and pleasure are passed down through generations of women. She is joined by Erin Langner, Manager of Editorial Projects at the Frye Art Museum, and Katie Lee Ellison, writer and founder of Nonfiction for No Reason.
For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn’t be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.
The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women’s experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield’s life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother’s history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.
Part memoir, part critical sense-making, part reckoning with family, identity, illness, addiction, art, and inheritance, Woman House draws on diverse inspirations in an attempt to recontextualize the female body—in danger, in pleasure, in portraiture, in proximity, in resistance—and challenge the structures that silence and restrict female expression.
Lauren W. Westerfield is the author of Woman House and Depth Control. Her essays and poetry have been published in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Westerfield is a 2022 Idaho Commission on the Arts Literary Fellow. She teaches at Washington State University, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review.
Erin Langner writes about art, architecture and identity. She is the author of the essay collection Souvenirs from Paradise (Zone 3 Press, 2022). Her writing has appeared in Electric Literature, The Drift, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail and The Stranger. Langner is the recipient of a Jack Straw Writers fellowship (2022) and the Good Hart Artist Residency (2023). She lives in Seattle and works at the Frye Art Museum.
Katie Lee Ellison is the founder, curator, and host of the Seattle-based international literary event series, @nonfictionfornoreason. You can find her monthly column of author interviews and book reviews in The Stranger, and essays in Shenandoah, The Seventh Wave, J Journal, and elsewhere. She’s a contributing editor at Moss, and her memoir-in-progress has been supported by Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, a Hugo House fellowship, and Tin House Summer Workshop. Find her at katieleeellison.com or read musings and about the next NFNR in her newsletter, A Beautiful Fad (https://katieleeellison.substack.com/).
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
USD 0.00
