When we think of memoir—literally, “a memory”—we often think of stories that take place in the distant past, that are concerned with what Sven Birkerts calls “getting hold of vanished experience.” But what happens when we’re trying to get hold of experience that isn’t vanished, but all too present? What about memoir that chronicles a more recent history, or that follows a writer through a moment in real time? How do we stay ahead of the story? And how do we separate life from art?

Join us in celebration of Beautiful Aliens: A Steve Abbott Reader (Nightboat Books, 2019) edited by Jamie Townsend, with an afterword by Alysia Abbott. In this long awaited, first ever retrospective of Steve Abbott's work you'll find writing, illustrations, and comics by this Gay Liberation hero and foundational Bay Area underground writer.

In Fairyland, which won an ALA Stonewall Award, Abbott chronicles her Haight-Ashbury upbringing with an openly bisexual father who succumbed to AIDS. Wickersham’s The Suicide Index, a National Book Award finalist, is a wise, moving, and often surprisingly humorous account of how she and her family endured in the aftermath of her gentle, affectionate father’s shocking suicide. The two authors will discuss their memoirs, their writing lives, and their other work.