Event in Memory of Author Maggie Estep
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Elisa Albert, Sari Botton, Chloe Caldwell, Dana Kinstler, and Rebecca Wolff will read from Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, a recent anthology of essays, at the Hudson Opera House on Saturday, March 8, 2014, at 5pm. The event will be dedicated to the memory of the late Maggie Estep, a contributor the anthology who lived in Hudson. Estep’s friend Chloe Caldwell – herself a contributor to the anthology and a Hudson resident — will read Maggie’s essay.
In 1967, Joan Didion wrote an essay called “Goodbye to All That,” a work of such candid and penetrating prose that it soon became the gold standard for personal essays. Like no other story before it, Didion’s tale of loving and leaving New York captured the mesmerizing allure Manhattan has always had for writers, poets, and wandering spirits.
In Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York, 28 writers took up Didion’s literary legacy by sharing their own New York stories. Their essays often begin as love stories do, with the passion of something newly discovered – the crush of subway crowds, the streets filled with manic energy, and the sudden, unblinking certainty that this is the only place on Earth where a person can become exactly who they are meant to be. As friends move away, rents soar, and love still remains just out of reach, each writer’s goodbye to New York is singular and universal, like New York itself.
About the Authors
Elisa Albert is the author of How This Night is Different and The Book of Dahlia. Her new novel, After Birth, will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in February 2015. She lives in Albany, N.Y., with her family and is at work on a new book about Amy Winehouse.
Sari Botton is a writer, editor, and New York Times bestselling ghostwriter. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, the Sun, the Village Voice, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, WWD, W, Memoirville, This Recording, xoJane.com, and assorted anthologies. She is a partner in The TMI Project, a non-profit that empowers teens and adults in need through workshops in memoir writing and live storytelling. Botton lives with her husband in Rosendale, N.Y.
Chloe Caldwell is the author of the essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray (Future Tense Books, April 2012). Her nonfiction has appeared in Salon.com, The Rumpus, Thought Catalog, Nylon, xoJane, The Frisky, The Sun Magazine, SMITH, Jewcy, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Freerange Nonfiction, The Faster Times, and Men’s Health. She is the founder and curator of the Hudson River Loft Reading Series. Caldwell lives in Hudson, N.Y.
Dana Kinstler‘s fiction has won the Gulf Coast fiction prize, Southern Indiana Review’s Mary C. Mohr Fiction Prize, and the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and has been published in Salamander and the Mississippi Review. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Stella Magazine/Sunday London Telegraph and numerous anthologies. She is a graduate of Brown University and the Bennington College Writing Seminars. Kinstler lives with her husband in Tivoli, N.Y.
Rebecca Wolff is a poet, fiction writer, and the editor and creator of Fence Magazine and Fence Books. Publishers Weekly praised her work sayings it “projects a vivid wit,” and “scenes and fragments [that] are urbane, knowing, always alert to irony.” Wolff received her MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, where she was assistant editor of the Iowa Review. She lives in Athens, N.Y.
About the Hudson Opera House
The Hudson Opera House offers a year-round schedule of arts and cultural programming in the former Hudson City Hall, which houses New York State’s oldest surviving theatre. Ongoing programs include concerts, readings, lectures, exhibitions, theatre and dance presentations, after-school programs, workshops, classes and community arts events like the annual Winter Walk on Warren Street.