Upcoming Events: Where You Can Find Us
Here’s a look at our upcoming online events, plus third-party event where you can find our authors and editors! [You may also view past events by using the month view and scrolling back.]
STORIES ON SUNDAY: The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo (Karen Babine)
Enjoy readings and hear the story behind the stories during this Stories on Sunday. Registration form follows event description.
This edition of Stories on Sunday features Karen Babine and her most recent book, The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo. She’ll read a few excerpts from the memoir, interspersed with a conversation led by Hippocampus Magazine founder/publisher Donna Talarico.
About the Series: Stories on Sundays are bi-monthly(ish) readings from a recent/forthcoming work of creative nonfiction followed by an author interview + audience Q&A. This is event is free or by donation; Your registration helps fund our contributor payments and other costs associated with running our journal.
ABOUT THE BOOK
One woman’s cross-country journey to explore the hold family history has on our lives, and the power of new stories to shape what lies ahead.
In her mid-thirties and happily single, Karen Babine hitches up her tiny Scamp camper and sets out with her two unenthusiastic cats, Galway and Maeve, on a journey from her home in Minnesota to Nova Scotia to explore the place where her French-Acadian ancestors settled in North America some four centuries ago.
As the miles roll by, she wonders: “Why do we carry this need to belong to an established history? What happens when that can’t–or shouldn’t–happen?” The road reveals more questions than answers about her history, identity, and belonging, about the responsibilities of stories and silence, about her life choices as a solo woman, and what it means to be driven by both a strong sense of kinship to a very close-knit family on one hand and a deep desire for independence on the other.
Capturing the joy, freedom, and powerful pull of the open road, The Allure of Elsewhere is about the stories we’re told, the stories we tell, and the way those stories make us who we are, often in surprising ways. Intimate, curious, and candid, written with wry wit and warmth, this is a courageous and inspiring memoir.
Karen Babine is the two-time Minnesota Book Award-winning author of The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo, All the Wild Hungers: A Season of Cooking and Cancer, and Water and What We Know: Following the Roots of a Northern Life. She is the founder and editor of Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies.
Forthcoming books include the first edited collection of Assay work, Beyond Truth and Fact: Innovations in the Craft of Creative Nonfiction, and Updraft: the lift, drag, craft, and flight of creative nonfiction. She is a UC Foundation associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga.
All Stories on Sundays guests have a connection to Hippocampus Magazine; Karen is a past contributor.
