Launch Your Laptop Into the Sun with Samantha Irby & Megan Stielstra

We’re walking through history—a pandemic, an uprising, and a presidential election, plus the deeply personal mountains we each move every day—and so many of us are hurting. How do we keep writing when *gestures wildly at the world*?

Essayists Samantha Irby and Megan Stielstra will discuss what it means to tell stories in this time and of this time, and why we have to keep trying—even when it hurts—and moving—even when we can’t move—and laughing—even when all we want to do is launch our laptops into the sun.

Samantha Irby is a writer whose work you can find on the internet. She writes a blog called bitches gotta eat and has written three books: Meaty, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, and Wow, No Thank You.

Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections, most recently The Wrong Way To Save Your Life, winner of the 2017 Book of the Year Award from the Chicago Review of Books. Her work appears in the Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Longreads, Tin House, and elsewhere. A longtime company member with 2nd Story, she has told stories for National Public Radio, Museum of Contemporary Art, Goodman Theatre, and regularly with The Paper Machete live news magazine at The Green Mill. She is on the MFA faculty at Northwestern University and serves as a mentor editor with The OpEd Project, supporting womens’ voices in public discourse. Stielstra is currently a Shearing Fellow at the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute.