Laundry

A Brattleboro Literary Festival Special Event

Laundry, as a metaphor for the personal narrative writing that women do, is all about the dirt. It’s about coming clean and putting it out in public. Bringing the personal and intimate into a public space is a transgressive and powerful act. At the same time, because the subject of personal narrative or confessional writing is lived experience and emotional travail, it is often derided as feminine, self-absorbed, and weak.  This event is about reclaiming and owning a kind of writing that is sometimes dismissed or denigrated. It embraces the notion that confessional writing is women’s writing. It’s about the lives of women and the way that women write about their lives. By putting their experience into words and then out into the world, women transform their lives in powerful ways and empower other women to do the same.

Laundry will feature mostly local women writers of diverse backgrounds and experience reading brief, sometimes raw, personal or confessional pieces in various formats–spoken word, poetry, and creative nonfiction. Readers—Meg Baronian, Shanta Lee Gander, Diana Whitney, Wendy Levy, Verandah Porche, Taite Blaise, Ruth Antoinette Rodriguez and others will present work at this event.