@The Library

Writers make choices: what to leave in, what to take out; what furthers a story, what doesn’t, what’s best to fictionalize, emotionalize, or factualize; what does the reader want, what do I want; when to write the truth, when to tell a good story.  Join three life-long writers of fiction and memoir as they read and discuss the influence of life’s experience on their work and the choices all writers must navigate along the way.

Moderated by Clydette de Groot, Paris Writers Workshop faculty members Sheila Kohler, novelist, Kevin Jackson, fiction and nonfiction writer, and Special Guest Paula Butturini, memoirist will read from their work and discuss: Making Choices; Structuring Life's Experiences into a Writer's Work.

Clydette de Groot is a clinical psychologist and spent 27 years in graduate medical education as a director of behavioral sciences in family medicine residency training programs affiliated with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. In addition to a private practice she had an extensive corporate consulting business working internationally with health care organizations and Fortune 500 companies, including Merrill Lynch, Union Carbide, Hewlett-Packard, and Pfizer. She now lives in Paris where she writes, consults, co-chairs a foundation and helps coordinate the American Library’s memoir reading group.

About the Panel

Sheila Kohler is the author of seven novels, most recently: Becoming Jane Eyre, Bluebird or the Invention of Happiness, Children of Pithiviers, Crossways, and Cracks, and three collections of short stories. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous revues. Among her awards are: two O.Henry's, the Open Voice Award, the Smart Family Foundation. Sheila Kohler has taught creative writing at Bennington, City College, The Chenango Valley Conference at Colgate, Sarah Lawrence, The New School, Suny Purchase, the West side YMCA, and in Montolieu, France and Columbia university, at Brooklyn College and now teaches at Princeton.

British writer, broadcaster, film-maker, and lecturer, Kevin Jackson has written or edited 23 books  and over 2,000 articles, reviews, features on film, photography, modern art, literature, language, and cultural history for  The New Yorker, The American Scholar, Vogue, Harper's, Sunday Telegraph,  Sunday Times, The Guardian and numerous other publications. He frequently works as a consultant and series editor for radio and television and has a regular monthly column on the British Radio 3's The Verb, and is a Visiting Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of London. His most recent books include: Moose (Reaktion, 2009), Bite: A Vampire Handbook (Portobello, 2009, and The Worlds of John Ruskin (Pallas Athene/Ruskin Foundation, 2010).

''Food has always been my lens and prism, my eye on the world,'' writes Paula Butturini in Keeping the Feast: One Couple's Story of Love, Food, and Healing in Italy. A former correspondent for UPI and the Chicago Tribune, Butturini lives in Paris with her husband, New York Times reporter John Tagliabue, and the couple's 12-year-old daughter, Julia. Her memoir delves deeply into personal tragedy - Tagliabue was shot while covering the 1989 Romanian uprising and later suffered from crippling depression - while celebrating the role food and its pleasures played in her family's recovery. Much of the drama takes place in Italy, where Butturini honed her skills as shopper, meal planner, and chef.