History Forum Talk by Prof. Susan M. Schultz - Wednesday, March 12

Please join us for a provocative discussion of "Writing History in a Time of Forgetting." This is our first in a series of Interdisciplinary History Forums, taking place on Wednesday, March 12 at 12:30pm in Sakamaki Hall A201, the UH Mānoa History Department Library. Future talks will include a botanist's history of cannabis and an economic historian's history of marriage and labor in Hawaiʻi.

Forgetting History: Alzheimer's & Documentary Writing: Susan M. Schultz, Department of English

My recent book, “She's Welcome to Her Disease”: Dementia Blog, Volume 2 (Singing Horse Press, 2013), combines poetry, diaristic writing, essay, children's stories (with dementia sufferers in them), myriad documents (emails, notices from the DoD, insurance forms), and other genres to tell the story of my mother's Alzheimer's and death. World War II was the central moment of her life, as it was for most of those in her Alzheimer's care home, but by the end she had forgotten that War. I will read from the book, and talk about how to write Alzheimer's. While I'm a creative writer, I'm eager to engage with historians on these important questions.

Susan M. Schultz has taught in the English department at UHM since 1990. She is a poet, critic, and editor/publisher of Tinfish Press, which she founded in 1995. Her books include A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (U of Alabama Poetry & Poetics Series, 2005), and more recently Dementia Blog (2008), Memory Cards: 2010-2011 Series (2011) and “She's Welcome to Her Disease”: Dementia Blog, Volume 2 (2013) from Singing Horse Press in San Diego. She recently participated on a panel about teaching documentary poetry at the Associated Writing Programs convention in Seattle. Susan blogs at Tinfisheditor.blogspot.com (the two books on dementia come largely from blog work), and cheers for the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.

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