The Unruly Past - Kalpakian, Laura
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To write a memoir is to take the grains of sand-individuals and particulars- and shape them into sandcastles. To make artful narrative of experience that, in the living of it, might have seemed random, even chaotic. Writing a memoir tames the unruly past, but it does not make it docile. Celebrated novelist Laura Kalpakian grew up in Southern California amid a blending of vastly different cultures. Her mother was born in Constantinople, only a toddler when the family, multi-lingual, urbanite Armenians, left Turkey and immigrated to Los Angeles after World War I. Her father joined the Navy after…mehr

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Produktbeschreibung
To write a memoir is to take the grains of sand-individuals and particulars- and shape them into sandcastles. To make artful narrative of experience that, in the living of it, might have seemed random, even chaotic. Writing a memoir tames the unruly past, but it does not make it docile. Celebrated novelist Laura Kalpakian grew up in Southern California amid a blending of vastly different cultures. Her mother was born in Constantinople, only a toddler when the family, multi-lingual, urbanite Armenians, left Turkey and immigrated to Los Angeles after World War I. Her father joined the Navy after Pearl Harbor, uprooting from an Idaho tribe of restless, rural, hardscrabble Mormons. These memoir essays explore both sides' colorful anecdotal inheritance as, over generations, their stories are codified, re-shaped to process unspoken pain. With candor and humor Kalpakian chronicles her stint as a teen reporter and gossip columnist. As a wayward apprentice in her twenties she lollygags through Paris imagining herself to be a writer, but lacking the courage to write. She masquerades as a graduate student among the ponderous Structuralists while secretly writing stories, none of them published. One of these stories escalates into one hundred pages, blossoms into a novel that sells to a major publishing house and collects critical applause. Commercially, the book flops. Her second novel, These Latter Days is rejected and her powerful editor dies. Returning to California, now the single mother of two young sons, she refuses to give up on These Latter Days-a book ironically rooted in Mormon traditions she had long since spurned, and a town she thought she had left behind forever. The Unruly Past asks questions of the author's past: the Armenian diaspora, Mormon tribalism, the warring instincts to revel or preserve, raising children in order to let them go. These essays are not content to simply tell what happened. They explore the larger, deeper chasms, the cracks and fissures of what must be imagined before it can be remembered.
Autorenporträt
Laura Kalpakian is the author of seventeen works of fiction (novels, novellas and story collections) in the US, the UK, and translated into languages abroad. Paint Creek Press has recently reissued a trilogy of St. Elmo books, These Latter Days, Caveat and the story collection, Dark Continent. Her first nonfiction book, Memory Into Memoir: a Writer's Handbook (University of New Mexico Press) won the 2022 Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Awards. Winner of an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the PEN West Award, and the Anahid Award for an American writer of Armenian descent, Laura Kalpakian also twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers' Award. Her novel, American Cookery was nominated for the 2007 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She has served as a regular book critic for both the Miami Herald and the San Jose Mercury News. She has held artists' residencies at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, the Montalvo Center for the Arts, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. A native Californian, Laura Kalpakian was educated on both the east and west coasts with a BA and an MA in history. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.