ONLINE: Jeannine Ouellette

press release: A Room of One's Own is proud to present a virtual conversation on Crowdcast between Jeannine Ouellette, author of the new memoir The Part That Burns, and fellow writer Sue William Silverman!

In The Part That Burns, Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically in order to see each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, Ouellette lives for the day she can become a mother herself, and create her own sheltering family. What she does not know is how the visceral reality of birth and motherhood will pull her back into the body she long ago abandoned, revealing new layers of pain and desire, and forcing her to choose between her idealistic vision of perfect marriage and motherhood and the birthright of her own flesh, unruly and alive. This is a story about the tenacity of family roots, the formidable undertow of trauma, and the rebellious and persistent yearning of human beings for love from each other.

Jeannine Ouellette's stories and essays have appeared widely, and her work has been supported with fellowships from Millay Colony for the Arts and Brush Creek Foundation. She is the recipient of a Margarita Donnelly Prize, Curt Johnson Fiction Award, Proximity Essay Award, Masters Review Emerging Writer's Award, two recent Pushcart nominations, as well as awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Medill School of Journalism. Her work has been praised by Joyce Carol Oates as "simply beautiful, precisely imagined, poetically structured, compelling, and vivid." Jeannine teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and is the founder and director of Elephant Rock, an independent creative writing program in Minneapolis.

Sue William Silverman is the author of four memoirs: How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, the Unversity of Nebraska Press American Lives Series; The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, also of the University of Nebraska Press American Lives Series; Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, winner of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Award Series in Creative Nonfiction; and Love Sick: One Woman's Journey through Sexual Addiction, which was also made into a Lifetime TV Original Movie. Her craft book is Fearless Confessions: A Writer's Guide to Memoir, and her poetry collections are If the Girl Never Learns and Hieroglyphics in Neon.