By Jessie Seigel, AIW Board Member

At noon on Saturday, May 22, I will be moderating AIW’s panel, The Writer’s Life: A Report from the Field, at the LitArtlantic Festival, at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda. The panelists are film maker David Taylor, novelist C.M. Mayo, journalist Alan Elsner, and biographer/memoirist Kevin Quirk.

Each of these authors is well established, but no one starts out that way. So, in part, we will, in our short hour, address how they got their starts and how their careers evolved.

Each of these impressive authors has worked and published across genres, not always an easy feat in these days of “specialization” and writers being boxed into a niche. We will talk about how they managed to accomplish that. Was there a plan? Did it evolve in an organic fashion?

And if there is time, it would be nice to hear a bit about their creative processes.

I will not, here, get into these authors’ accomplishments and awards, which are many and impressive (you can check our website or an e-mail that was sent to the list-serve for that). But I do want to tell you a little about some of their extraordinary work.

David Taylor has created both a film and a book on the WPA Writer’s project, entitled A Soul of a People. Though I have not yet had the pleasure of seeing the film, I have read the book and found fascinating the story of writers (Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, John Cheever, and Studs Terkel among them) collecting the stories of Americans of every cultural heritage, in every walk of life, and in every nook and cranny of our country. Also fascinating are the strong parallels between the New Deal political battles and those we face today.

While many historical novels use an historical period as the backdrop for fictional protagonists, C.M. Mayo’s novel, The Last Prince of the Mexican Empire, tells the stories of actual historic personages—the Mexican Emperor Maximilian; the Iturbide family; the American, Alice Green, who married into Mexican aristocracy and was half-bribed/half-strong armed into giving her infant son to Maximilian to raise as the heir to his “Mexican Empire.” Mayo has used extensive research combined with the imaginative leap to try to reconstruct the motivations—political, emotional, and psychological—behind their actions.

In my view, Alan Elsner’s Gates of Injustice: The Crisis in America’s Prisons is straightforward, hard-hitting journalism at its very finest. Elsner is not telling sob stories, not playing on your sympathy, but hitting you with cold, hard facts—right between the eyes. I found this book painful to read, found myself getting angry, feeling that many of those running our prisons should themselves be in them.

Finally, Kevin Quirk’s book, Brace for Impact: Miracle on the Hudson Survivors Share Their Stories of Near Death and Hope for New Life, presents 25 first-person accounts of passengers and first responders from the January 2009 plane crash into New York’s Hudson River. Quirk’s focus is not the crash itself but on the ways in which coming so close to dying affects people’s faith and/or lack of it and their approach to their daily lives. Having worked as a ghost writer and with people who want to set down their own stories, Quirk is well-positioned to draw these stories out.

I hope this taste of these authors whets your appetite as their works have whet mine, and that you’ll join us on the 22nd to hear their stories!

Details: The panel will be held from 12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m., Saturday, May 22, at The Writer’s Center, 4508 Walsh Street, Bethesda, Maryland (just off Wisconsin Ave., a few blocks south of the Bethesda Metro station, Red line).

Further information: For information about the entire LitArtlantic Festival, of which AIW’s panel is a part, go to www.writer.org. The entire festival, including Story/Stereo: Hybrid Literature/Music Event (Thursday, May 20); Creativity Crossing Borders and Works in Progress Film Screening (Friday, May 21); Young Songwriter’s Showcase, Workshop for Children, and Hive@LitArtlantic(a resource fair) (Saturday, May 22), should make for an entertaining time.