Day 27: Aspects of Autofiction with Shuchi Saraswat & Stacy Mattingly

What is Autofiction? What barriers between genres does it allow us to break? How does it allow us to simply follow what is happening on the page as our book grows and becomes what the writer wants or even needs it to be? Writers Shuchi Saraswat and Stacy Mattingly help us explore the form.

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Shuchi Saraswat is a writer and editor based in Boston. Her work has appeared in AGNI, The Boston Globe, The Boston Art Review, Ecotone, Coffee House Writers’ Project, Tin House online, Arrowsmith and elsewhere. Her essay "The Journey Home" received a special mention in Pushcart XLII 2018 and is anthologized in Trespass: Ecotone Essayists Beyond the Boundaries of Place, Identity, and Feminism. For ten years she worked as an independent bookseller in Massachusetts. During that time she founded The Transnational Literature Series at Brookline Booksmith, a reading series focused on stories of migration, the intersection of politics & literature, and works in translation, and in 2019 she served as a judge for the National Book Award in Translated Literature. She’s now the associate editor and a co-nonfiction editor at the literary journal AGNI, and she teaches classes in creative nonfiction at GrubStreet.

Stacy Mattingly is coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Unlikely Angel, an Atlanta hostage story now a feature film, Captive, starring David Oyelowo (Selma) and Kate Mara (House of Cards). Stacy’s work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Oxford American, Off Assignment, EuropeNow, and elsewhere. In 2012, she launched the Sarajevo Writers' Workshop in Bosnia and Herzegovina and later helped lead the first Narrative Witness exchange (Caracas-Sarajevo) for the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. An Atlanta native, Stacy teaches at Boston University, where she received an MFA in fiction, and she is an assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. Her recently completed first novel is set in the present-day Balkans.