The second edition of TELL-ALL was January 17, 2019!
Click here for event photos!
Middlesex Lounge
315 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA
Special Guest: Garrard Conley, author of Boy Erased
Garrard Conley’s first book, Boy Erased: a memoir (Penguin 2016) was a top Oprah.com, Buzzfeed, and L.A. Times nonfiction read and is now a major motion picture from Focus Features. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, TIME, VICE, Virginia Quarterly Review, CNN, and elsewhere. He has been a Bread Loaf and Sewanee scholar and was the instructor of the Memoir Incubator program at GrubStreet in Boston. His first novel is forthcoming from Riverhead/Penguin.
Conley is also a producer and creator of the podcast UnErased, which explores the history of conversion therapy in America through interviews, historical documents, and archive materials provided by the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C. He is a member of the PEN/America Foundation and serves on the board of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C.
He lives in New York with his husband.
Tell-All also featured readings by four emerging writers:
Cheryl Levine is a former newspaper columnist and freelance editor. She has had essays published in 24PearlStreet blog and Silver Birch Press. A former GrubStreet Master Memoir participant, she is currently working on a memoir dealing with a range of intersecting topics from her Italian-American heritage, to parental abandonment and its effects on identity, to scary medical diagnoses, and aging with grace and humor.
Rani Neutill was a professor of Ethnic American and Postcolonial Literature at institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Johns Hopkins University. Her work has appeared in Salon, The New York Times Book Review, Hobart, Redivider, amongst other publications. She has work forthcoming in Catapult and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her work in Redivider. She is a 2017 Pauline Scheer Fellow and a graduate of GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program. She’s working on a transnational memoir titled do you love me? about fractured identity and her relationship with her mentally ill Bengali immigrant mother. She’s represented by Erin Harris at Folio Literary Management.
Catherine O’Neill is a debut author working on a memoir, Zero Balance, which is about the effects of gambling and losing the men she loved to their addiction. She grew up in Ireland with a father who was a compulsive gambler. She gambled into the dizzy hours in America with her spouse, a problem gambler, before she found recovery in a twelve step program. Catherine returned to her love of writing in her forties, graduating from the GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator program and attending Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 2017 and attending the AWP Conference in 2018. She recently received an honorary mention from IWWG, the International Women’s Writing Guild.
Melanie S. Smith has been a writing instructor at Boston University for ten years; she is a current participant in the GrubStreet Memoir Incubator. Her personal essay, “Death at the Paw Paw Tunnel,” was published in the 2018 summer issue of the Fredericksburg Literary and Arts Review. “Heart Murmur” grew out of her longer memoir about marrying a man dying of cancer and the healing power of love even in the context of incurable illness.
tellallboston.com 