While working as an intern in the archives at the Harry Ransom Center, Jenn Shapland encounters the love letters of Carson McCullers and a woman named Annemarie—letters that are tender, intimate, and unabashed in their feelings. Shapland recognizes herself in the letters’ language—but does not see McCullers as history has portrayed her.

And so, Shapland is compelled to undertake the recovery of the full narrative and language of McCullers’s life: she wades through therapy transcripts; she stays at McCullers’s childhood home, where she lounges in her bathtub and eats delivery pizza; she relives McCullers’s days at her beloved Yaddo. As Shapland reckons with the expanding and collapsing distance between her and McCullers, she sees the way McCullers’s story has become a way to articulate something about herself. The results reveal something entirely new not only about this one remarkable, walleyed life but about the way we tell queer love stories.

In genre-defying vignettes, Jenn Shapland interweaves her own story with Carson McCullers’s to create a vital new portrait of one of America’s most beloved writers and shows us how the writers we love and the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are. Shapland will be joined by three Blue Stoop community members who will read short passages of Carson McCullers’ work that has been meaningful to them.

Jenn Shapland is a writer living in New Mexico. Her nonfiction has been published in Tin House, Outside, the Lifted Brow, Essay Daily, and elsewhere. She won the 2019 Rabkin Foundation Award for art journalism, and her essay “Finders, Keepers” won a 2017 Pushcart Prize. She teaches as an adjunct in the Creative Writing department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her first book, My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, will be available from Tin House Books in February 2020.

Jenn photo credit: Christian Michael Filardo