How can we grant ourselves permission to write the stories we’re compelled to tell - even when we’ve been told we shouldn’t?

Author Elissa Altman has done just that. Her newest book, Permission, is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you’ve been told you can’t, and how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

Join us in conversation with Elissa. Copies of Permission will be available for purchase and signing.

About Elissa Altman

Elissa Altman is the award-winning author of the memoirs Motherland, Treyf, and Poor Man’s Feast, and the bestselling essay substack of the same name. A longtime editor, she has been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Connecticut Book Award, Maine Literary Award, and the Frank McCourt Memoir Prize, and her work has appeared in publications including Orion, The Bitter Southerner, On Being, O: The Oprah Magazine, LitHub, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Washington Post, where her column, “Feeding My Mother,” ran for a year.

Altman writes and speaks widely on the intersection of permission, storytelling, and creativity, and has appeared live on the TEDx stage and at the Public Theager in New York. She teaches the craft of memoir at Fine Arts Work Center, Maine Writers & Publisher, Kripalu, Truro Center for the Arts, Rutgers Community Writing Workshop, and beyond. She lives in Connecticut with her wife, book designer Susan Turner.

About Permission

“Elissa Altman’s marvelous, passionate and charming new book, Permission, is going to breathe freedom into your life. It is a clarion call for writers to tell their hard, lifelong truth, no matter how may decades they have agreed to stay silent. Lies and cover-ups won’t save you. This book just might.” - Anne Lamott, New York Times bestselling author of Bird by Bird

Permission is a master course, not only on how to craft memoir, but how to begin and keep going when you've been told you can't, and how to give yourself permission to transcend the fear that keeps vital stories from being written.

This book will inspire and guide all creatives to a place of transformation, of freedom from the constraints of shame and fear in all their forms, and to the understanding and recognition of the ethics of story-making, art-making, truth-telling, and creative soul-saving. (bookshop.org)