Erika Duncan, an experienced essayist and memoirist herself, has taken on a commitment to helping adult woman write their own stories for the first time. The border crossings to which she refers in her title are geographic and cultural, interior and exterior. Her lessons about telling a story that will draw the reader in are as relevant for six-year-olds as they are for sixty-year-olds.
Author Biography
Erika Duncan is the author of the novels A Wreath of Pale White Roses and Those Giants: Let them Rise, and the collection of essays and portraits, Unless Soul Clap its Hands. For almost four years, her portraits of artists and writers, and dreamers and doers were a monthly front page feature in the Long Island Weekly Section of The New York Times. In the mid-1970’s, she co-founded the Woman’s Salon, an alternative literary network to bring critical attention and audience support to emerging women writers, even as she developed an approach to the teaching of writing that would bring her to settings as diverse as the Department of Mathematics at New York University; Orland, Maine’s Rural Education Program; Goldwater Hospital; and finally, Brooklyn, where she trained teachers in some of the borough’s more troubled schools. She is completing a manual for leaders of grass roots memoir writing groups, based on her experience with Herstory Writers Workshop (www.herstorywriters.org), as well as her own memoir, Dreamer in the Play Yard: The Therapist’s Daughter.