Wednesday, September 13 at 6 P.M. at The Mechanics Institute
WHAT THE BODY HOLDS: Its Shame & Its Pleasure: A Discussion & Reading with Memoirist, Isidra Mencos, and fiction writer, Leslie Kirk Campbell
A co-sponsored in-person event with our friends at the Mechanics’ Institute.
The event will end with a Q & A with the audience.
After the reading, mix with authors, members of the WNBA-SF, and those of the Mechanics Institute.
Campbell and Mencos will discuss what drew them to write books that investigate the topic of the female body. They will share ways women (themselves included) have felt shame about their bodies and how both societal expectations and abject repression (political, religious, and/or gender-based) affect women’s attitudes toward their bodies—including how women may self-repress as a consequence of external oppression. Finally, they will broach how their protagonists came to a point of acceptance of their bodies, opening to pleasure.
Each of these three topics will be illustrated with short readings from their books. The event will end with a Q & A with the audience. A reception with light refreshments will follow.
Mencos‘s memoir, Promenade of Desire: A Barcelona Memoir, narrates a young woman’s journey from repression to liberation in tandem with Spain’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. As the country transforms itself, the shy María Isidra evolves into the alluring Isadora, whose passion for books and salsa dancing sustains her as she discovers what it means to be lustful and loved and reclaims her whole self. Promenade of Desire has won a Silver Medal for Multicultural Non Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2022, among other honors.
PRAISE FOR PROMENADE OF DESIRE: “A brave and unblinkingly honest portrait of a young woman’s sensual and sexual awakening in the face of censure and repression, and her refusal to be held back by the constraints of her family, culture, and religion. The same joyful spirit that expresses itself in Mencos’ love of dancing shines through in her story of her own personal dance into a brave new world beyond the one her mother prescribed for her. Her story is shameless, in the very best sense of the word.”
–Joyce Maynard, New York Times best-selling author of Labor Day, To Die For, and Count The Ways
“…Unique and Intriguing…” Julia Scheeres
“Page-turning…Vivid…Gutsy…” Aaron Shulman
Leslie Kirk Campbell‘s short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs, investigates the ways people both succeed and fail to reconcile their sense of self, their deepest passions, and their own loneliness, through friendship, love, and their own damaged bodies; and how, when confronted with an unexpected encounter with a stranger outside their familiar sphere of reference, a troubled person can experience profound change. At its core, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs is about body-memory, the way we hold our pasts on our skin, visibly – bruises, scars, tracks, tattoos – and invisibly, over generations. In small towns and cities across the US, characters reckon with their body’s relationship to grief, illness, technology and genocide. Three of the eight stories focus on the violation of women’s bodies and the risky decisions we make when pushed to the extreme.
Isidra Presenting on a AWP 2023 Panel
Isidra Mencos was born and raised in Barcelona. She spent her twenties experimenting with the new freedoms afforded by the end of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, bouncing from man to man and job to job while immersing herself in books and dancing. She freelanced for prestigious publishing houses, traveled the world as a tour leader, and worked for the Olympic Committee. In 1992 she moved to the US to earn a PhD in Spanish and Latin American contemporary literature at UC Berkeley, where she taught for twelve years. She also developed her own business as a writer and editor for Spanish-speaking media. From 2006 to 2016 she worked as Editorial Director of the Americas for BabyCenter, the leading global digital resource for parents, and managed teams in several countries. In 2016 she quit her job to dedicate herself to writing. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Quarterly Review, Front Porch Journal, The Penmen Review, WIRED, The Huffington Post, and Better After Fifty among others. Her essay “My Books and I” was listed as Notable in The Best American Essays Anthology. Today Isidra lives in Northern California with her husband and son.
Leslie Kirk Campbell‘s short story collection, The Man with Eight Pairs of Legs won the 2020 Mary McCarthy Prize for Short Fiction (Sarabande). The collection is a 2022 Women’s National Book Association Great Group Reads Selection, a 2022 Foreword INDIES winner in short fiction, and a finalist for American Book Fest’s 2022 Best Book Awards for Short Story. Campbell’s short stories have won first-place awards at Arts & Letters, Briar Cliff Review, Southern Indiana Review, and The Thomas Wolfe Review. She is also the author of Journey into Motherhood: Writing Your Way to Self-Discovery (Riverhead). A native Californian, she teaches at Ripe Fruit Writing, a creative writing program she founded in San Francisco in 1991.
Registration Information:
FREE to WNBA members, members use code WNBA
General admission sliding scale: $5-10
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