Shaping Identity, Writing the Soul: Memoir

Sunday August 18, 2024 — 1:30 pm

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How does our sense of self form, and how much of our identity is shaped by our genes, by the imprint of our forebears and by our own life experience?

In this session, Debbie Lee speaks with Hilton Koppe, Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo and Michelle Scheibner, three authors who follow different paths but find common ground in the process of writing memoir and revealing the soul.

Artists

Hilton Koppe

Hilton Koppe is a writer, educator, podcaster and doctor living on Bundjalung Land. Hilton facilitates reflective writing workshops for doctors and other health professionals with the goal of deepening their compassion, overcoming professional isolation and reducing risk of burnout. The workshops have been adapted for people living with chronic and mental illnesses, as well as enthusiastic amateur writers. Hilton has been invited to present his workshops all the way from Byron Writers Festival to Harvard Medical School. Hilton’s book, One Curious Doctor: A Memoir of Medicine, Migration and Mortality, explores the personal impact of working as a country doctor.
Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo

Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo is the author of My Father’s Shadow (Monash University Publishing, 2023). She grew up in St Kilda and spent time in New York City. Her short stories and poems have been published in Griffith Review and Westerly, among others. Her novel, The Book of Rachel, was published by Allen & Unwin and later translated into German. Sandra’s business, Dead Set, was the first desktop publishing company established to work specifically with book and journal publishers. Concurrently, she also worked for forty years as a freelance non-fiction editor for leading academic and trade publishers. Today she lives in central Victoria where she cooks, writes, and gardens.
Michelle Scheibner

Michelle has spent the last three years researching how we inherit a genetic blueprint from our family of origin, influencing our decisions, choices, and legacy. Her memoir, Hush, decodes these links, illustrating how history, culture, beliefs, and genetics intersect to shape lives through unhealed inherited family trauma. Michelle is a published TEDx speaker with over 25 years’ experience as a coach and mentor. She completed Inherited Family Trauma Training with Mark Wolynn, founder of The Family Constellation Institute and author of It Didn’t Start with You: How Inherited Family Trauma Shapes Who We Are and How to End the Cycle.
Debbie Lee

Debbie Lee is Festival Director, Melbourne Jewish Book Week. She has worked in the publishing industry for over 30 years, primarily with academic publishers such as Cambridge University Press, UNSW Press and Elsevier. More recently she has been instrumental in building the profile of ‘indie authors’, and has convened the Indie Publishing Forum and the Small Press Network annual conference, as well as presenting on the independent publishing revolution at various writers festivals including Byron Bay, Adelaide and Perth. She is the new owner of boutique publishing house, Ginninderra Press.