Body Work: Melissa Febos and Lily Dunn in Conversation Chaired by Julia Bell

In her bold and exhilarating new book 'Body Works' Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering fresh examination of the storytellers life and the challenges it presents. How do we write about the relationships that formed us? How do we describe our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean to have your writing dismissed as 'navel-gazing'?
Joining Melissa to discuss this an other questions is Dr Lily Dunn, author of 'Sins of My Father'. Lily recently completed her PhD at Birkbeck and is a mentor and educator in the field of non-fiction. The discussion will be chaired by Julia Bell
Melissa Febos is the bestselling author of four books, including Girlhood-winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative. Her fifth book, The Dry Season, is forthcoming from Canongate Books in the U.K. Her awards and fellowships include those from the Guggenheim Foundation, LAMBDA Literary, the National Endowment for the Arts, The British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Febos is a professor at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City with her wife, the poet Donika Kelly.
Lily Dunn is an author and mentor. Her latest book is Sins of My Father: A Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, March 2022), a literary memoir about her enduring love for a delinquent father, described by Marina Benjamin as 'a necessary, brilliantly brave book.' Her personal essays have appeared in Granta, Hinterland, Litro and The Real Story in the UK and she is a regular writer for the international Aeon magazine. Her first novel, Shadowing the Sun was published by Portobello Books, and the Big Issue described it as ‘a vivid and meaningful portrait of innocence destroyed’. She is co-editor ofA Wild and Precious Life: A Recovery Anthology: a collection of stories and poetry from writers in recovery from addiction and mental illness (Unbound, May 2021). Lily teaches narrative nonfiction at Bath Spa University and co-runs London Lit Lab with friend and author Zoe Gilbert.

[@munakhan2469]

Really enjoyed this conversation. It helped me decide to take a memoir course one day