Lynn C. Miller

"The Unmasking is smart, irreverent, and wickedly tender."--Jesse Lee Kercheval, author of My Life as a Silent Movie: A Novel

The Unmasking

Best friends Bettina, Miriam, and Fiona are shocked when their dean of liberal studies dies in a single-car accident amid accusations of mishandling university funds. They suspect murder, especially after learning that the dean’s estranged wife will inherit three million dollars. Events take a surprising turn when they travel from Austin, Texas, to a Chautauqua performance in Silver City, New Mexico, where they join several others, some with questionable motives, including the dean’s wife and her lover. In the close confines of the lodge, the group brings to life remarkable women from history—including Victoria Woodhull, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Virginia Woolf. But when one woman is kidnapped and another disappears, the friends’ lives are forever changed as they realize that the masks we wear often hide chilling truths.

A Novel

M. Heather Carver

Jacqueline Taylor

This volume includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of women such as Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe and Anais Nin, which consider issues that arise when a woman represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers tell their own stories, engaging issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death. autobiographical performance. It examines the links between theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory and performance practice.

Performing Women's Autobiography

Voices Made Flesh

Ronald J. Pelias

Proceedings of the Giant City Conference on Performative Writing, April 26-29, 2001

The Green Window

Fourteen bold, dynamic, and daring women take the stage in this collection of women's lives and stories. Individually and collectively, these writers and performers speak the unspoken and perform the heretofore unperformed. The first section includes scripts and essays about performances of the lives of Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Mary Church Terrell, Charlotte Cushman, Anaïs Nin, Calamity Jane, and Mary Martin. The essays consider intriguing interpretive issues that arise when a woman performer represents another woman's life. In the second section, seven performers--Tami Spry, Jacqueline Taylor, Linda Park-Fuller, Joni Jones, Terri Galloway, Linda M. Montano, and Laila Farah--tell their own stories. Ranging from narrrative lectures (sometimes aided by slides and props) to theatrical performances, their works wrest comic and dramatic meaning from a world too often chaotic and painful. Their performances engage issues of sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, loss of parent, disability, life and death, and war and peace. The volume as a whole highlights issues of representation, identity, and staging in autobiographical performance. It examines the links among theory and criticism of women's autobiography, feminist performance theory, and performance practice.

In Death of a Department Chair, protagonist Miriam Held recounts the events of the previous fall when she was suspected of killing Isabel Vittorio, the chair of her department and her former lover. The controversial and contrary Vittorio was, at the time of her death, attempting to block the hire of a brilliant African American female professor. Already under siege for her attempts to increase diversity on campus, Miriam is forced to defend her reputation and her life. As she searches for the truth, Miriam amasses evidence that leaves few friends and colleagues free from suspicion. Both a classic whodunit and a witty satire, Death of a Department Chair dramatizes how communities can create the very climate of mistrust and paranoia that victimizes them.

Death of a Department Chair

Lisa Lenard-Cook

Every person has a story to tell, but few beginners know how to uncover their story's narrative potential. And despite a growing interest among students and creative writers, few guides to the genre of memoirs and creative nonfiction highlight compelling storytelling strategies. Addressing this gap, authors Lynn C. Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook provide a compact, accessible guide to memoir writing that shows how an aspiring memoir writer can use storytelling tools and tactics borrowed from fiction to weave personal experiences into the shape of a story. Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir offers an overview of the building blocks of memoir writing. Individual chapters focus on key issues and challenges, such as the balance between the remembering narrator and the experiencing narrator, the capacity to honor the subjective voice, the occasion of telling (why does this narrator tell this story now?), creating an organically functional structure for a particular story, and taking the next steps with a written memoir. Drawing on their combined years of experience teaching memoir writing, authoring works of fiction and nonfiction, and working in autobiographical performance, Miller and Lenard-Cook provide a practical guide whose core philosophy is motivated by a key word: story. Bronze winner, Foreword Book of the Year, Writing Guides

Lynn C. Miller

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