SUNY Adirondack offers final Writers Project event of the semester

QUEENSBURY, New York (April 23, 2026) — SUNY Adirondack Distinguished Professor of English Lâle Davidson, who founded the college's Writers Project, will close out this semester's series with “How to Write Fiction About Family Without Starting a Family Feud” at 12:30 p.m. Monday, April 27, in SUNY Adirondack’s Visual Arts Gallery in Dearlove Hall.

Davidson will share examples of her short stories to demonstrate the intricacies of navigating autobiographical fiction. “When I was younger, I thought it was a failure of imagination, that I should invent characters out of whole cloth, so to speak,” Davidson said. “Over the years, I’ve come to understand that most writers base their characters off composites of people they know.”

Davidson’s novels "Blue Woman Burning" (2021), "Against the Grain" (2022) and "Beyond Sight" (2023) were published by Emperor Books. "Against the Grain" won two National Indie Excellence Awards in 2023. Her collection of experimental short stories, "Strange Appetites," won the Adirondack Center for Writing’s People’s Choice Award in 2016, and a story in that collection, “The Opal Maker,” was named one of the Top 50 very short fiction publications of 2015 by Wigleaf contest judge Roxane Gay.

She won a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activity, and a President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Davidson earned a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College and a doctorate in writing from University at Albany.

“The idea of inventing an entire complex individual was intimidating,” Davidson said. “People are universes, how can one accurately imagine one's way into another person's mind?”

In her Writers Project event, Davidson will share which parts of what stories are based on her life and how she balances fiction and reality.

“If anyone thinks they recognize themselves in my writing, or if I have based my writing on another person, I tell them that I would never be so arrogant as to assume I have captured their entire essence on paper,” she said. “I've merely borrowed a few surface traits and bent them to my own purposes.”

This is the final Writers Project of the semester, perhaps fitting, as Davidson founded the series and will retire after this semester.

Writers Project events are free and open to the public. The event is also screened live via Zoom at https://us06web.zoom.us/j/7977212478?pwd=ZXU5WlpJRXZ1YmZoNFNJak1yYVpSUT09