Snapshots

Dinah Lenney is a member of the core faculty at Bennington College, USA where she teaches creative nonfiction. She has published 4 books within the genre including Coffee (2020) as part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series, The Object Parade (2014), Bigger than Life (2007) and was co-editor of Brief Encounters (2015) which brought together over 70 short nonfiction pieces. She has given a TEDx talk on the relationship between art and life and her essays and reviews have been published in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post among other publications.

If pictures are worth a thousand words then just how many words, and what kinds of words, might they inspire? What stories would they tell and would they be happy or sad, elegant or savage?Intimate, philosophical and moving, Snapshots features powerful meditations from 30 well-known writers, each of whom draws on a photograph from their personal archive to inspire a short essay.Charged and intimate, these reflections exhibit a range of sensibilities and experiences, offering unique insight into the lives and interests of both established and emerging authors. Expressing a dynamic array of styles, experience, relationships, landscapes, preoccupations, and rituals from such authors as Teju Cole, Celeste Ng, Dinty Moore, Sven Birkerts, Hilton Als, Sonia Livingston, Roxane Gay, Melissa Febos, Deborah Levy and C. N. Lester, this is an album for our life and times.

IntroductionSuggested themes (to be finalised once the essays are delivered)1. Place2. Work3. Family4. Strangers5. Me, myself, and i6. Animal7. Vegetable8. Mineral9. Weather10. TimeContributors from Brief Encounters likely to work with Dinah Lenney again and to be included in the volume:Sven Birkerts, Paul Lisicky, Hilton Als, Stuart Dybek, Dinty W. Moore, Sonia Livingston, Barbara Hurd, Abigail Thomas, David Ulin, Nicole Walker, Eula Biss, Joe Bonomo, Emily Rapp Black, Meghan Daum, Phillip Lopate, Amy Gerstler, Suzanne Berne, Roxane Gay, and Joan Wickersham.New contributor wishlist:Major Jackson, Attica Locke, Lynell George, Marie Mitsuki Mockett, Sandra Tsing Loh, Jenny Boully, Cliff Thompson, Alexander Chee, Aimee Liu, Suleika Jouad, Karen Karbo, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Amanda Fortini, Jennifer Croft, Melissa Febos, Deborah Levy, Ross Gay, Geoff Dyer, Kim Adrian, C. N. Lester, Casey Cep, Lynne Tillman, Martha Aldrich, Geoff Nicholson, Celeste Ng, Vanessa Hua, Tash Aw, Ruth Ozeki, and Teju Cole.