About this item
Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love.Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style.
About the Author
Tara Ison is the author of the short story collection BALL, and the novels THE LIST, A CHILD OUT OF ALCATRAZ, a Finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and ROCKAWAY, which was featured in O, the Oprah Magazine, as one of the "Best Books of Summer" in July 2013. REELING THROUGH LIFE, a collection of essays, won the 2015 PEN Southwest Award for Creative Nonfiction. Her short fiction, essays, poetry and book reviews have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, newspapers and anthologies. She is also the co-writer of the cult film Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead. For more info see: www.taraison.com. Contact: info@taraison.com, or follow her on Twitter @TaraIsonWriter and Facebook.com/TaraIsonWriter.Ison is the recipient of an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, a COLA Individual Artist Grant, multiple Yaddo fellowships, a Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Study, a Brandeis National Women's Committee Award, a Thurber House Fiction Writer-in-Residence Fellowship, the Simon Blattner Fellowship from Northwestern University, and a California Arts Council Artists' Fellowship Award. Ison received her MFA in Fiction & Literature from Bennington College. She has taught Fiction and Screenwriting at Washington University in St. Louis, Northwestern University, Ohio State University, Goddard College, Antioch University, UC Riverside's MFA Program in Creative Writing, and Bennington College. She is currently Professor of Fiction in Arizona State University's creative writing program.
