Editor's Note: Applications for weeklong and weekend advanced workshops close March 8.
Alex Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, which received a Lambda Literary Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices Elle, the Prix des Libraires du Quebec, and the Prix France Inter-JDD. It has been translated into 11 languages. Their essays appear in the 2020 and 2022 editions of Best American Essays as well as The New York Times, Harper’s, Agni, Yale Review, and many other publications. A 2023 United States Artists fellow and the Rogers Communications Chair in Creative Nonfiction at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Marzano-Lesnevich’s next book is the transgender and trans-genre memoir Both and Neither, forthcoming from Doubleday and publishers internationally.
What are you working/currently trying to work on these days?
I'm on deadline for what I'm calling a work of haunted nonfiction, to be published by Doubleday. It's titled Both and Neither and it's part memoir, part researched but also speculative retelling of the lives of five people we would today consider transmasculine or non-binary. They haunt me and I haunt them, in their respective time periods. It's about ancestry, longing, and belief. Which is another way of saying it's about hope. It's also about confronting historical erasure and the deep need to imagine my way to a more complete narrative.
What’s your workshop style, and what can people expect at Lit Fest?
My main workshop goals, always, are to meet every writer where they're at and to help them make their work the best possible version of itself it can be. I run an encouraging, rigorous, and writer-centered workshop, with an eye to prioritizing the writer's vision of their work and helping them dig deeper with it.
If you could only bring three books with you on a deserted island, which ones would you choose, and why?
Ohh, hard question! I always have a stack of books around me because I never know what I'll want to read at a given time. But I feel like deserted island time would mean lots of thinking about life trajectory and meaning and solitude, and the book that's been at the forefront of my mind on that this year is Sarah Leavitt's new graphic memoir, Something, Not Nothing, about her partner's assisted suicide, but really about love and solitude and grief and what we're all doing with this whole life thing, anyway. And then because I'd want a beloved-to-me immersive book, probably Tolstoy's Anna Karinina. Finally, Hil Malatino's Trans Care, a gorgeous book-length essay on community, because I imagine I'll want to still feel connected to the larger human project of being together. But ask me tomorrow (or even later today!) and I'm sure my list will have changed!
What’s one artist or writer more people should know about?
I'm sad to say that when I was living in the United States, I hadn't read Joshua Whitehead! It's been a great joy to encounter his books and know, already, how much I'll be rereading them, particularly Making Love With the Land.
At Lit Fest this summer, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich will be teaching their Advanced Weeklong Nonfiction Workshop: The Fractured, The Lyric, and The Imaginary in Contemporary CNF. Interested in working with them? Apply today!
To learn more about Lit Fest, tuition, fellowships, and advanced class admittance, click here.
