Place as Portal to Prose

Part of Litquake’s Craft and the Creative Life series

Setting is intrinsic to story and we often hear the phrase “place as character” but what does that really mean to writers from different forms or genre? The discussion will explore what part place plays in their writing practice, how they utilize place as a way to form narratives in their respective writing styles, what resources they tap into, and how they infuse their settings with personality. There will also be a short reading of each writer’s favorite pieces of prose about place. Featuring Megan Harlan, Ann Harleman, Katie M. Flynn, and Tania Malik.

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Megan Harlan is an award-winning essayist and poet who grew up in seventeen homes across four continents. She’s the author of Mobile Home: A Memoir in Essays, winner of the AWP Prize and the Independent Book Publisher Award in Creative Nonfiction, finalist for the Northern California Book Award, and critically acclaimed in The New York Times Book Review, Kirkus, Booklist, and elsewhere. Her poetry collection, Mapmaking, was awarded the John Ciardi Prize and called “a miracle of invention” by Alice Fulton. Her writing has been cited several times in Best American Essays anthologies and has appeared in AGNI, The New York Times, Crazyhorse, Arts & Letters, Hotel Amerika, Colorado Review, and elsewhere. She edits Farsickness, an online journal of literary travel, and lives with her family in the San Francisco Bay Area and Brittany, France.

Ann Harleman is the author of two short story collections—Happiness, which won the Iowa Short Fiction Award, and Thoreau’s Laundry—and three novels, Bitter Lake, The Year She Disappeared, and Tell Me, Signora. Among her awards are Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, three Rhode Island State Arts Council fellowships, the Berlin Prize in Literature, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, the O. Henry Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award. In an earlier life, having been the first woman to receive a Ph. D. in linguistics from Princeton, Harleman lived and worked behind the Iron Curtain and in Italy. Now happily living within sight of San Francisco Bay, she is on the faculty of Brown University.

Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in Indiana Review, The San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and Tor.com, among other publications. She has been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction, a fellowship from the San Francisco Writers Grotto, and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Katie holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco and an MA in Geography from UCLA. Her first novel, The Companions, came out in March 2020, and opens during a prolonged quarantine where the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in as companions. Her interlinked collection of short stories, Island Rule, is forthcoming from Scout Press.

Tania Malik (moderator) is the author of the forthcoming novel Hope You Are Satisfied (Unnamed Press), as well as Three Bargains (W.W. Norton) that received a Publishers Weekly starred review and a Booklist starred review. Her writing has appeared in Calyx Journal, Baltimore Review, Salon.com, and other publications. She was raised in India, Africa and the Middle East and currently lives in the Bay Area.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Southern Exposure, 3030 20th Street, San Francisco, United States