{"id":3044,"date":"2013-11-15T16:55:56","date_gmt":"2013-11-15T20:55:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/?p=3044"},"modified":"2015-02-20T17:21:13","modified_gmt":"2015-02-20T21:21:13","slug":"the-ordinary-instant-jessica-penner-01","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/2013\/11\/15\/the-ordinary-instant-jessica-penner-01\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe Ordinary Instant\u201d \u2014 Jessica Penner &#8217;01"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/media\/podcasts\/11.15.13--JessicaPennerChapel.mp3\">Your browser does not support the audio element.<\/audio><br \/>\nIn her powerful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes: \u201cLife changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.\u201d Jessica Penner, author of Shaken in the Water, talks about what she is learning about the art of memoir-writing and the need for a writer to make an ordinary extraordinary for the reader. She also reads an excerpt from her Pushcart Prize-nominated essay, \u201cMustard Seed,\u201d which documents her brain surgery on September 11, 2001. <a href=\"http:\/\/webdoc.nyumc.org\/nyumc\/files\/blr\/u16\/Mustard_Seed.pdf\">The full text of Penner&#8217;s essay can be found here<\/a>. Dr. Danielle Ofri, Editor-in-Chief of Bellevue Literary Review, wrote about the essay: \u201cI was taken by it from the very first. (And not just because I was also working in the hospital on 9\/11, trying to take care of my regular patients at Bellevue.) It\u2019s quite unusual to have an essay deal with religious belief in such a nuanced way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Chapel begins with a\u00a0 short video clip by students from the current chapel video series, &#8220;Where have you seen God?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Penner released her debut novel-in-stories, Shaken in the Water (Foxhead Books), in April 2013. She has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Center for Mennonite Writing, Rhubarb and the anthology Tongue Screws and Testimonies. She won an honorable mention for the short story \u201cHomebody\u201d in Open City\u2019s RRofihe Trophy contest and an honorable mention for the essay \u201cMustard Seed\u201d in Bellevue Literary Review\u2019s Burns Archive Prize for nonfiction.<\/p>\n<p>Penner earned a BA in theater and English at EMU and a MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She previously taught English to international students at James Madison University and currently resides in New York City.<\/p>\n<p>For more information on <a href=\"http:\/\/plautdietschforhome.blogspot.com\/\">Penner<\/a> visit <a href=\"http:\/\/foxheadbooks.com\/\">Foxhead Books<\/a> .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<div class=\"emu-podcast-embed\"><audio controls src=\"https:\/\/emu.edu\/media\/podcasts\/11.15.13--JessicaPennerChapel.mp3\">Your browser does not support the audio element.<\/audio><\/div><p>In her powerful memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion writes: \u201cLife changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.\u201d Jessica Penner, author of Shaken in the Water, talks about what she is learning about the art of memoir-writing and the need for a writer to make an ordinary extraordinary for the reader. She also....<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[409],"tags":[4095,4420],"class_list":["post-3044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapel","tag-jessica-penner","tag-writers-read","has-post-thumbnail","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3044"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3047,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3044\/revisions\/3047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/podcast\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}