October 5, 2020
Augustana Library Associates will be hosting its fall 2020 author event virtually, featuring Patricia Hampl, on Tuesday, October 13, at 7:30 p.m. Library Associates has hosted at least one author event annually since its inception in 1983.
The St. Paul, Minnesota, native is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer and educator. Hampl teaches in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) Program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis. She is also one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center, whose mission is to advance the artistic development of writers, foster a thriving literary community and inspire a passion for literature.
Mikkelsen Library Director Ronelle Thompson said, "The Augustana Library Associates board members are thrilled to host Patricia Hampl for our first-ever virtual author event. Hampl will discuss her adventures as an author and share the ways in which reading and writing allow us all to discover our common humanity through our life stories."
Hampl is described as “one of the best practitioners of the genre” using a “heritage of remembrance and imagination” to drive her stories. In Hampl’s first memoir, A Romantic Education — published in 1981 — she shares her desire to be a writer but also the assumption that she would have an additional career. Writing would just be something she did in addition to her profession. The book chronicles her discovery that nothing else ever took the place of writing for, “wanting to be a writer was wanting to be a person.” Hampl has continued writing memoirs including Virgin Time (1992), Blue Arabesque (2006), The Florist’s Daughter (2007), and most recently, The Art of the Wasted Day (2018). Her memoirs tell the story of a “writer in the making.” In I Could Tell you Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (1999), Hampl writes about the memoir genre itself, always drawn back to the “transformative value of remembering and paying attention to our lives, no matter how ordinary they seem.”
Tickets can be purchased at augielink.com/hampl. General admission is $5; tickets are free for Augustana students.