CityLit Studio: Writers on Craft, Creativity, & Community presents: 

Writing Your Life Story with Memoirists Jeannie Vanasco & Sarah Labrie

Tuesday, October 28, 2025

from 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm EST/3:30 pm - 5:30 pm PST

VIRTUAL. FREE. The Zoom link will be sent after registration.

CityLit Studio – Writers on Craft, Creativity, & Community, presented as a part of Free Fall Baltimore, is a unique opportunity for writers to experience readings/lectures by two authors in different or similar genres with a different approach. Participants engage in deep-dive discussions on craft and the writing process.

Jeannie Vanasco: To Tell the Truth in Memoir, Study Poetry

How can poetic techniques help memoirists tell the truth as accurately as possible? While some writers argue that fixating on facts contradicts the aims of art, Jeannie Vanasco believes that facts—as best we can access them—can further the artistry of nonfiction, serving as formal constraints. Of course, memory fails and self-deception exists, but memoirists are less likely to get to the experiential and emotional truths by deliberately inventing details. Poetic techniques can help us fasten passages together that resist the cause-and-effect relationship popularized by Western notions of plot. This session is tailored to memoir writing and will include close readings, discussion, generative prompts, and Q&A.

Sarah Labrie: Using Nature's Forms

A Lichtenberg figure is a branching, treelike pattern found across natural and engineered phenomena in lightning, river deltas, human anatomy, and architectural design. We’ll use this shape as a model for discussing the book-length memoir. How can multiple stories emerge from a singular origin point? How do we organize our manuscripts according to the natural forces that govern the development of everything from trees to airports?

The Studio is an information and discussion session on key aspects of craft to improve writing and learn the importance of finding artistic communities. Emerging and serious writers, along with the interested general public, get a unique look behind the writing process of two of the region’s esteemed literary stars. A writer-to-writer craft series to help writers and poets envision their art.

In addition to offering significant craft instruction, it gives support and insight into preparing writers for the business of publishing. Past featured authors and industry professionals include: Carmen Giménez Smith and David Yezzi, Maurice Ruffin and Donna Hemans, Yahdon Israel, Krishan Troutman, and Dawn Raffel, Eugenia Kim and Danielle Evans, among many others. 

Visit: Past CityLit Studios

Jeannie Vanasco

Jeannie Vanasco is the author, most recently, of A Silent Treatment, which Booklist, in its starred review, described as "a beautiful gift to all who have struggled to care for a loved one in the way they needed." Her other memoirs include Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl—a ​New York Times Editors' Choice and a best book of 2019 by TIME, Esquire, Kirkus, among others—and The Glass Eye, which Poets & Writers called one of the five best literary nonfiction debuts of 2017. Born and raised in Sandusky, Ohio, she lives in Baltimore and is an associate professor of English at Towson University. 

jeannievanasco.com

About A Silent Treatment:

​Vanasco is without question one of the most versatile and inventive memoirists working today, and her latest tells a powerful story of the gulfs that separate people and the love that bridges them. 

~ WBEZ Chicago

I look to Jeannie Vanasco to learn where memoir can go next, what psychic spaces it has yet to broach. In A Silent Treatment, Vanasco’s response to her mom’s silence unearths rage, loyalty, bottomless need, and probes the bounds of reality itself. It’s impossible to read without questioning one’s own primary relationships: How can we be enough to each other? How should we relate to those who love and harm us most deeply? What do we owe our parents and ourselves? Provocative, gripping, and dancing on the edge of madness, A Silent Treatment is a transformative thriller. I couldn’t put it down, and it still hasn’t let go of me. 

~Jenn Shapland, author of Thin Skin

Sarah Labrie

Sarah LaBrie is a Bay Area-born TV writer who grew up in Houston and currently lives in Los Angeles. She is the author of No One Gets to Fall Apart (Harper, 2024), a 2024 New York Times Notable Book and a finalist for the Writers League of Texas Book Award. Lorrie Moore calls No One Gets to Fall Apart “a brilliant memoir... a triumph of every kind of literary perseverance,” and the Los Angeles Times hails it as “extraordinary.” Her television credits include Minx (Starz), Blindspotting (Starz), Love, Victor (Hulu), and Made for Love (HBO Max). She currently has projects in development with Hulu and UTV. She’s been granted fellowships by Yaddo, Macdowell, and the Austin Film Society and is an alumna of Brown University and New York University’s MFA in fiction program. 

sarahlabrielivesinlosangeles.com

Instagram: @itsmesarahlabrie

About  No One Gets to Fall Apart:

"This is a brilliant memoir about what we inherit and what we create; what disappears and what remains. Full of intelligence and rueful humor, No One Gets to Fall Apart is a triumph of every kind of literary perseverance." 

~ Lorrie Moore, author of I am Homeless if This is Not My Home

“No One Gets to Fall Apart forms a remarkable meditation on inheritance, race and mental illness, the mother-daughter relationship and the blurry line between madness and artistic brilliance.”

~  Kristin Martin for NPR

Tickets are free. The event is open to all. Registration is required. 

You can order the author's books from Greedy Reads.