Nancy Mairs, a contemporary nonfiction writer whose works have received national acclaim, visits Elon University on March 17 for a 7:30 p.m. lecture in Whitley Auditorium sponsored by the Liberal Arts Forum. Mairs will also spend part of her visit to Elon working with students in a creative writing/nonfiction class.
Nancy Mairs, “Writing in the Margins”
Whitley Auditorium, 7:30 p.m.
All writing – indeed, all work – comes out of the self. Our lives are stories that we tell about ourselves, and so even the most trivial action is a form of self-expression. Mairs writes personal essays explicitly from an aging, disabled, feminist, spiritually radical viewpoint outside the mainstream, “marginalized,” to use a term that emerged during the 1970s.
From her official biography:
Born in Long Beach, Calif., Mairs grew up north of Boston and received her A.B. cum laude from Wheaton College in 1964. She did editorial work at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard Law School before moving to Tucson, Arizona, where she earned the M.F.A. in creative writing (poetry) in 1975 and the Ph.D. in English literature (with a minor in English education) in 1984 from the University of Arizona. Mairs has taught writing and literature at Salpointe Catholic High School, the University of Arizona, and the University of California at Los Angeles.
A poet and an essayist, she was awarded the 1984 Western States Book Award in poetry for In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (Confluence Press, 1984) and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1991. Her first work of nonfiction, a collection of essays entitled Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman’s Life, was published by the University of Arizona Press in 1986. Since then, she has written a memoir, Remembering the Bone House, a spiritual autobiography, Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith, and Renewal, and three more books of essays, Carnal Acts, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, and Waist-High in the World: A Life Among the Nondisabled, all available from Beacon Press.
The work on her latest book from Beacon, A Troubled Guest: Life and Death Stories, was funded by a fellowship from the Soros Foundation’s Project on Death in America.
She and her husband, George, a retired high-school English teacher, continue to live in Tucson, though they make public appearances throughout the country. A research associate with the Southwest Institute for Research on Women, she also serves on the boards of ARTability, the Sonora Fund, Kore Press, and the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty.