Courtesy photo
SANTA BARBARA — Santa Barbara Museum of Art to present: “Writing in the Galleries,” 5:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 16, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara.
Writers of all levels are invited to participate in this informal exploration of the Museum’s galleries as an impetus to writing. In January, Nora Gallagher, author of memoir, fiction, and essays, leads the group and discussion. Participants are free to write on their own and then reconvene as a group to share and comment on each other’s work. Please bring a journal or notebook, laptop, or tablet on which to write.
Free
To reserve a spot, email communityprograms@sbma.net.
More about Nora Gallagher:
Nora Gallagher is an American writer of memoir, fiction and essays whose work, as one reviewer put it,” is renewing the language of ultimate concerns.” Her most recent book, Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic, is a memoir that explores her experience with a baffling affliction poised to take her sight. A map of illness, uncertainty, and faith that is both meditative and highly relatable for anyone who has experienced life-threatening illness or supported a loved one who has, Moonlight Sonata was published by Alfred A. Knopf on May 21, 2013.
Moonlight Sonata at the Mayo Clinic is part three of a quartet on modern faith as it is lived out. The quartet begins with Things Seen and Unseen: A Year Lived in Faith published by Knopf in 1998. Followed by Practicing Resurrection: A Memoir of Work, Doubt, Discernment, and Moments of Grace. Things Seen and Unseen was a bestseller and a finalist in the Spiritual category of the 1998 Books for a Better Life Awards. An excerpt was a finalist for Best Spiritual Essays.
Gallagher’s novel Changing Light was well-reviewed in The New York Times and other publications. It was chosen by the Times as an Editor’s Choice.
Gallagher learned writing on the ground in San Francisco as a stringer for TIME Magazine where she covered the Patricia Hearst trial, the Moscone and Milk assassinations, the Dan White trial and subsequent riots and the AIDs crisis. Later, she worked for Life Magazine and freelanced, traveling to countries where she was interested in how people were living in the shadow of large events. She reported on families in Prague, just after the Velvet Revolution and the strange case of Jan Kavan, a dissident accused of collaboration. In Nicaragua during the Sandinista regime, she wrote about daily life, including a production of “Waiting for Lefty” at the National Theater.
Her essays, book reviews and journalism have appeared in many publications including The New York Times Magazine, DoubleTake, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times Magazine, Utne Reader, the Village Voice, and the Psychotherapy Networker.
She was born in New Mexico, the daughter of Julie Walcott Gallagher, who taught herself architecture, and David Gallagher, who learned the law at Yale Law School and in practice. She was educated at St. John’s College, where she studied the Great Books of the Western World. She lives with her husband, the writer Vincent Stanley, in Santa Barbara, California.