Defying Genre: Writing on the Edge of Conventional Narrative

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Mechanics' Institute

Join award-winning Bay Area authors Rita Bullwinkel, Lauren Markham, and Manjula Martin in conversation on creative and thought-provoking storytelling across genres. Through their recent publications – Headshot, a novel set at a teenage girl’s boxing tournament, A Map of Future Ruins, a journalist’s ruminations on the refugee crisis in Greece, and The Last Fire Season, a memoir of life among the California wildfires, these three authors use distinctive subject matter and style to weave vivid narratives that defy categorization.

Praise for Headshot:

“As blazing and distinctive a performance as I’ve beheld in a long while. Bullwinkel’s figurative language is tethered at one end to the distant galaxies, at the other to the cellular structure of her young fighters’ bodies. Whole lives are strung between. I’m amazed.” ―Jonathan Lethem, author of Brooklyn Crime Novel and Motherless Brooklyn

Praise for A Map of Future Ruins:

“This stunning meditation on nostalgia, heritage, and compassion asks us to dismantle the stories we’ve been told—and told ourselves—in order to naturalize the forms of injustice we’ve come to understand as order.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

Praise for The Last Fire Season:

“Martin comes in with a one-two punch: Her book is as lyrical as a prose poem but as smartly reported as the best journalism. Her account of living a year in the smoldering, angry, inflamed Northern California woods will thrill, haunt, and ultimately charm you.”—Susan Orlean, author of On Animals

About the Authors

Rita Bullwinkel is the author of Headshot and Belly Up, a story collection that won the Believer Book Award. She is a 2022 recipient of a Whiting Award, the editor of McSweeney’s Quarterly, a contributing editor at NOON, the creator of Oral Florist, and a Picador Guest Professor of Literature at Leipzig University in Germany, where she teaches courses on creative writing, zines, and the uses of invented and foreign languages as tools for world-building.

Lauren Markham is a writer based in California whose work regularly appears in outlets such as Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. She is also the author of the award-winning The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life and the recently-released A Map of Future Ruins: On Borders and Belonging. Her third book, Immemorial, will be published by Transit Books in 2025.

Manjula Martin is author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. She is coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the 2020 American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and she was managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning literary journalZoetrope: All-Story. She lives in Western Sonoma County, California.

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