“The We of Me: Writing the Relations that Define Us”
Thursday, May 4 | 3:00 p.m.
Seattle Pacific University
Library Reading Room
Our stories often find their significance where the “me” and the “we” intersect. This talk will consider the ways the personal essay decenters the self to make room for another’s experience, complicating and enriching the individual in the process.
Isaac Anderson is the 2016-17 Milton Fellow at Image journal. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fourth Genre, Image, Portland Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literature and Belief, and elsewhere, and his piece “Lord God Bird” (Image issue 72) received honorable mention in Best American Essays. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the Ohio State University, has taught at Ohio State, Lenoir-Rhyne University, and Western Theological Seminary, and has been a writer-in-residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.
As Milton Fellow, Isaac is working on a collection of essays titled This Is How the End Begins, a manuscript that examines moments of personal or historic consequence as threshold moments of birth and death, opening and closure. His essays consider subjects such as American identities and rituals, fidelity, addiction, loneliness and prayer, faith and science, cultivating empathy, religious extremism, and contingency as a native part of human being.
This event is free and open to the public. Q&A to follow.