LitFest: The Essay as “Attempt”: Making Sense of the World With Personal Essays with Matt Ortile

It was once decreed that “the personal essay boom is over.” In the years since, the personal essay has evolved: Authors are making the personal more explicitly political, connecting their individual experiences to broader cultural topics, trends, and ephemera in order to better understand the former, the latter, or both. But this evolution, Montaigne might argue, is in fact a return to its roots; they are “essays” or “attempts” at making sense of the confounding world we live in. In this talk, author Matthew Ortile (The Groom Will Keep His Names) discusses why and how he deploys the personal essay form to elucidate the issues that trouble and fascinate him most as the journalist of his own life.

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This is one of many events happening for LitFest 2022, which runs Aug 20 - Sept 24. For a full list of programs, visit: www.metrolibrary.org/litfest

About the author:
I’m the author of the essay collection The Groom Will Keep His Name. Currently, I’m the executive editor of the National Magazine Award-winning publication Catapult, where I was first its managing editor. Before that, I was the founding editor of BuzzFeed Philippines. I’m also a MacDowell Fellow and I write regularly for Condé Nast Traveler. I’ve written for BuzzFeed News, Vogue, Esquire, Out, and Into, among others. I graduated from Vassar College, which means I now live in Brooklyn.