This in-person event is open to current students, faculty, and staff. Other members of the SLC community are welcome to view the event on Zoom by registering here.
Today in June we are waiting for the Pentagon to say what they haven't said about UFOs, and hearing the virus may indeed have been leaked from a lab. I am thinking about the difference between the stories we trust because we are expecting to hear them, need to hear them, can't imagine beyond them--and the intimate and surprising trust great writers of nonfiction (journalists, but also essayists and fiction writers and poets) inspire. What September will be like I do not know but maybe I will talk about this: toxic narrativity, on the one hand, and on the other, the craft of trust, its mystery across forms and genres, and the deep personal work of becoming trustworthy.
Kristin Dombek’s essays have been anthologized in Best American Essays and elsewhere, and translated across the globe. You can find some in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The London Review of Books, Vice, and n+1, for whom she writes an occasional advice column called The Help Desk. She is the author of The Selfishness of Others: An Essay on the Fear of Narcissism (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2016), and has been awarded a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award, a n+1 Writer’s Fellowship, a Calderwood Journalism Fellowship, and residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo. She’s taught writing at New York University, Princeton University, Queens College/CUNY, and Queens University of Charlotte, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the MFA program.