The Non-Fiction of Joan Didion - March Seminar
Saturdays, March 5 – 26, 2016 10:30 am – 12:30 pm (4 meetings)
In the late ‘60s, Joan Didion introduced readers to her masterful interweaving of personal narrative and cultural critique in Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a collection of nonfiction essays that transformed the genre. More recently, she altered the structure and poetics of memoir through her description of sudden loss and all-consuming grief—and the life that follows—in The Year of Magical Thinking, which won the National Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In this seminar we will explore how Didion’s nonfiction portrays the richness and rawness of the human experience, witnessing and accepting others and herself throughout.
With very special guest, Tracy Daugherty, author of the recent acclaimed Didion biography, The Last Love Song.
Guide: Satya Doyle Byock is a writer and psychotherapist in private practice in downtown Portland. She has led previous Delve Seminars on Joseph Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand Faces and Carl Jung’s Red Book. Her personal essays and other writing have been published in Oregon Humanities, The Hairpin, andPsychological Perspectives, and her essay Going Astray is listed as a Notable Essay in The Best American Essays 2015.
Tuition: $125 / Location: Literary Arts, 925 SW Washington, Portland, Oregon, 97205