All families have stories some members don’t want told. Memoirists often struggle with the ethical complexity of telling those stories—with writing about relatives, particularly when their narratives pertain to emotionally-charged conflicts; the revelation of family secrets; contested shared histories; or stories involving such subjects as abuse, trauma, addiction, mental illness pertaining to family members.
Moderator B.K. Jackson with panelists Ona Gritz, Kathy Curto, and Casey Mulligan Walsh will discuss the hard choices they face and the questions they must ask themselves when writing about family:
Who owns a story? Who has the right to publish shared experiences? What do we owe to the people we write about? What’s our motivation: can we clearly distinguish the need to tell our truth versus writing out of vindictiveness or revenge? Is consent or review necessary or desirable? What are the potential repercussions of telling fraught family stories? How can we mitigate the risk of negative consequences and protect ourselves and the people we write about?
B.K. Jackson, a writer and editor based in Milford, PA, is founder of Severance, an online magazine and community for individuals separated from biological family. She is the author of Relative Strangers: Inheritance, Identity, and the Meaning of Kinship
Ona Gritz’s memoir, Everywhere I Look, received the Clara Johnson Award, the Readers’ Choice Gold Award, Pencraft’s Best Book Award, and was named StoryTrade’s Nonfiction Book of 2024. She writes verse novels teens, including Take a Sad Song, a Kirkus Reviews’ best YA title, and The Space You Left Behind, a Children's Book Council Disability Pride Month Recommended Read. Ona lives with her poet-husband Daniel Simpson in Lansdowne, PA. Her essays and poems have appeared widely.
Kathy Curto is a writing professor and the author of Not for Nothing-Glimpses into a Jersey Girlhood (Bordighera Press, 2018) and the editor of the multi-genre collection, What Are You Waiting For? An Anthology (Motina Books, forthcoming, July 2026.) She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family and can be found in her front yard, on most mornings, replenishing her Little Free Library with donated books. This practice has become one of her daily delights. Please visit: www.kathycurto.com or on IG @kathy.curto.
Casey Mulligan Walsh is the author of the award-winning memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared. She has written about living with grief beside joy, embracing uncertainty, and the nature of true belonging for The New York Times, HuffPost, Next Avenue, Modern Loss, Hippocampus, Barren Magazine, Atticus Review, and numerous other literary magazines. Her essay, “Still,” published in Split Lip, was nominated for Best of the Net. She is a founding editor of In a Flash literary magazine and serves as a board member and ambassador for the Family Heart Foundation. Casey lives in upstate New York with her husband, Kevin, and too many books to count. Learn more at caseymulliganwalsh.com.
