Be Well Be Here presents our seasonal online literary event :

Be Brave Book Group: Debut Memoirists

BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group features celebrated authors sharing mindful conversation about their personal journeys as writers and the risks taken to craft authentic, meaningful narratives.

On Sunday, December 13 at 4:30 pm, we feature the work of memoirists E. Dolores Johnson, author of Say I’m Dead, and Grace Talusan, author ofThe Body Papers. While a portion of the evening will be spent discussing their work, Dolores and Grace will also discuss the pitfalls of writing about personal events, their experiences sharing stories with controversial themes, and how memoir writers stay creative and engaged during times of crisis. Come with your questions and leave inspired!  

Please DONATE to Be Well Be Here to support mindful wellness programming for ALL.

Say I’m Dead, a memoir of secrets, separation and transformation, chronicles four generations who overturned forbidden race-mixing norms amid America’s persistent bigotry. In 1942, Dolores Johnson’s black father and white mother fled Indiana’s Klan and anti-miscegenation laws to legally marry in New York, twenty-four years before the Supreme Court made mixed-race marriage legal.

Dolores was born in Buffalo, NY. She earned degrees from Howard University and Harvard Graduate School of Business. After a career in tech, she took an MFA equivalent course to learn creative writing. Johnson is a published essayist focused on inter-racialism. Johnson lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Body Papers, Grace Talusan’s acclaimed memoir-in-essays exploring the immigrant experience, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a Must-Read and winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, a Foreword INDIES Finalist, and winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.

Grace was born in the Philippines and raised in New England. She graduated from Tufts University and the MFA Program in Writing at UC Irvine. She is the recipient of a U.S. Fulbright Fellowship to the Philippines and an Artist Fellowship Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She taught writing for many years at Tufts University and Grub Street. Currently, Grace is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University.

Be Well Be Here presents our inaugural online literary event :

BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group

Each season, BWBH’s Be Brave Book Group features celebrated authors sharing conversation about their personal journeys as writers and the risks taken to craft authentic, meaningful narratives.

This summer, on Tuesday, August 25 at 7:30 pm, we feature the work of two historical novelists: Marjan Kamali (The Stationery Shop) and Whitney Scharer (The Age of Light). While a portion of the evening will be spent discussing the novels, Marjan and Whitney will also delve into their personal stories and discuss their journeys to becoming writers, the pitfalls they encountered while writing about real historical figures and events, and how to stay creative and engaged during times of crisis. Come with your questions and leave inspired!  

Please DONATE to Be Well Be Here to support mindful wellness programming for ALL.

About THE STATIONERY SHOP: Roya, a dreamy, idealistic teenager living amid the political upheaval of 1953 Tehran, finds a literary oasis in Mr. Fakhri’s neighborhood stationery shop, stocked with books and pens and bottles of jewel-colored ink.When Mr. Fakhri, with a keen instinct for a budding romance, introduces Roya to his other favorite customer—handsome Bahman, who has a burning passion for justice and a love for Rumi’s poetry—and she loses her heart at once. Their romance blossoms, and the little stationery shop remains their favorite place in all of Tehran. A few short months later, on the eve of their marriage, Roya agrees to meet Bahman at the town square when violence erupts—a result of the coup d’etat that forever changes their country. In the chaos, Bahman never shows. For weeks, Roya tries desperately to contact him, but her efforts are fruitless. Resigned, she moves on—to college in California, to another man, to a life in New England—until, more than sixty years later, an accident of fate leads her back to Bahman and offers her a chance to ask him the questions that have haunted her for more than half a century.

About THE AGE OF LIGHT: "I'd rather take a photograph than be one," Lee Miller declares after she arrives in Paris in 1929, where she soon catches the eye of the famous Surrealist Man Ray. Though he wants to use her only as a model, Lee convinces him to take her on as his assistant and teach her everything he knows. As they work together in the darkroom, their personal and professional lives become intimately entwined, changing the course of Lee's life forever.
Lee's journey of self-discovery takes her from the cabarets of bohemian Paris to the battlefields of war-torn Europe during WWII, from inventing radical new photography techniques to documenting the liberation of the concentration camps as one of the first female war correspondents. Through it all, Lee must grapple with the question of whether it's possible to stay true to herself while also fulfilling her artistic ambition--and what she will have to sacrifice to do so.

NEW at Be Well Be Here! Join us for our monthly Mindful Book Group for a live Zoom discussion of celebrated literary fiction. The selection for May is WRITERS & LOVERS, by Lily King.

“Writers & Lovers follows Casey—a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist—in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King’s trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.” - GroveAtlantic.com

Led by author, master writing instructor and Concord Festival of Authors curator, Lara Wilson, MA

Please register to receive your Zoom link!