MEMOIRS: FAMILY FUNCTION & DYSFUNCTION

3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
| Location of Session: Launch SA Center
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 4:15 PM
| Signing Location: Adult Signing Tent

My Schedule

About the Event

Stefan Merrill Block and Amanda Uhle chronicle the challenges of growing up, in these tender and heartbreaking yet hilarious memoirs. In Homeschooled, Block guides us through his mother’s all-consuming love and his own quest to discover the world beyond the front door, while explaining the unregulated homeschool system that impacts millions. In Destroy This House, Uhle documents her father’s wheeling and dealing, her mother’s acute hoarding disorder, and the boundless love of her family.

About the Author

Photo Credit: Dana McClure

Stefan Merrill Block

Stefan Merrill Block grew up in Plano, Texas. His first book, The Story of Forgetting, was an international bestseller and the winner of Best First Fiction at the Rome International Festival of Literature, the Ovid Prize from the Romanian Writers’ Union, the Merck Serono Literary Prize, and the Fiction Award from the Writers’ League of Texas. The Story of Forgetting was also a finalist for the debut fiction awards from IndieBound, Salon du Livre, and The Center for Fiction. Stefan’s novels have been translated into ten languages, and his stories and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker’s Page-Turner, The Guardian, NPR’s Radiolab, Granta, Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. He lives in upstate New York.

Stefan joins the Book Festival to discuss his memoir, Homeschooled.

Photo Credit: Melanie Maxwell

Amanda Uhle

Amanda Uhle writes about culture, politics, and civil rights for The Washington Post, Politico, The Boston Globe, and Newsweek. Uhle is coeditor of the I, Witness series of first-person stories by youth activists and former director of the 826michigan youth writing and tutoring program. She is also cofounder, with Dave Eggers, of the International Congress of Youth Voices, and their work with youth writing organizations worldwide is documented in the book Unnecessarily Beautiful Spaces for Young Minds on Fire: How 826 Valencia, and Dozens of Centers Like It, Got Built—and Why. Uhle is the publisher and executive director of McSweeney’s, an independent nonprofit publisher of distinctive books and magazines. Her new book is Destroy This House.

Moderator

Andrew Porter

Andrew Porter is the author of four books, including the story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter and the novels In Between Days and The Imagined Life. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in Best American Short Stories, One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, The Southern Review, and on Public Radio’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative-writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas.