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Meet THe Team
Kick off your Southern Festival of Books weekend with The Porch on Friday, where you’ll have a unique opportunity to learn from celebrated authors as they pass through Nashville before the festival officially begins! Stick around for the rest of the day to take more writing classes with Ruben Reyes Jr., Hannah Pittard, and Sheree Renée Thomas.
How can poetic techniques help memoirists tell the truth as accurately as possible? While some writers argue that fixating on facts contradicts the aims of art, Jeannie Vanasco believes that facts—as best we can access them—can further the artistry of nonfiction, serving as formal constraints. Of course, memory fails and self-deception exists, but memoirists are less likely to get to the experiential and emotional truths by deliberately inventing details. Poetic techniques can help us fasten passages together that resist the cause-and-effect relationship popularized by Western notions of plot. This session is tailored to memoir writing and will include close readings, discussion, generative prompts, and Q&A.
• In-Class Writing Lift: Light
• Homework: None
• Workshopping Drafts: None
Jeannie Vanasco is the author of the memoirs Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—which was named a New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Her third book, A Silent Treatment, was published by Tin House in September 2025. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University.
Jeannie is new to The Porch. Welcome!
