(Tucson, AZ) Local author Margo Steines will kick off the Spring 2026 Writer in Residence program on Tuesday, February 17. Her residency will run through April 29, 2026.
Margo will be available for eight 30 minute one-on-one sessions per week at Flowing Wells Library, 1730 W. Wetmore Rd. Please note, sessions tend to fill up quickly. There is a limit of one session per week.
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Tuesdays, February 17 through April 28
10 am to noon -
Wednesdays, February 18 through April 29
10 am to noon
Registration opens one week prior before each consultation. Writers under 18 years of age must be accompanied by a parent or guardian.
Margo will also host three workshops. Registration is not needed for workshops.
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Memory Excavation for the Writer
Saturday, February 28 from 10:30 am to noon
Flowing Wells Library, 1730 W. Wetmore Rd.
For the memoirist, memories are currency. Our stories and experiences are what we bring to the table. As nonfiction writers, our relationship to the truth, and to accuracy, is the foundation of our contract of trust with our readers. And yet, it can be surprisingly difficult to conjure up the details of experiences from long ago (or even…from not so long ago!). So what’s a writer to do?
In this seminar, participants will unpack the value and limitations of memory. Margo will guide you through a holistic memory excavation process, and you will learn how to iterate the work so that you can apply it to memories you want to bring authentically into your work.
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Writing the Nonfiction Scene
Saturday, March 14 from 11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Tucson Festival of Books, Manuel Pacheco Integrated Learning Center - 1500 E. University Blvd., Room 119
Learning to write an immersive true-to-life scene will allow you to create your own narrative building blocks, which you can use to construct any type of prose you are interested in writing.
This generative seminar will offer a high level introduction to the uses of scenes in creative nonfiction writing before walking writers through the creation of a new scene of their own generation. Together, we’ll enact sample scenes to experience what dialogue sounds like read aloud and what narrated movements look like in real time and space. We will think together about when and where do use scenes in creative nonfiction, and leave with a new or renewed attunement to the craft function of scene.
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Writing Parenthood
Saturday, April 18 from 10:30 am to noon
Flowing Wells Library, 1730 W. Wetmore Rd.
Parenthood is a radical experience that often comes with huge shifts in identity, lifeways, and our understandings of what it means to be alive, in community, raising humans. As writers, we come to the page to process, analyze, and make meaning of our experiences, and yet parenthood (certainly early parenthood) leaves little room for the kind of reflection that literary work demands.
This generative seminar will serve as a space to consider where your work as a writer and your life as a parent intersect. We will think together about how to work with these intersections, considering where they make the work more challenging and what we can do to navigate those challenges, as well as where they make the work richer and what we can do to pull from that well.
About Margo Steines
Margo Steines holds an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Arizona and lives and writes in Tucson. Her work was named Notable in Best American Essays and has appeared in The Sun, Slate, The Guardian, Air Mail, Brevity, Off Assignment, The New York Times (Modern Love), the anthologies Letter to a Stranger and The Book of Alchemy, and elsewhere. She is the author of the Kirkus-starred memoir-in-essays Brutalities: A Love Story.
Margo is faculty at Pima Community College and is also a private creative coach and creative writing class facilitator. Her pedagogy is compassionate and trauma-informed, with value placed on process before product.
About her book, Brutalities: A Love Story
From the publisher, "Quarantined in a southwestern desert city in the midst of her high-risk pregnancy, Margo Steines felt her life narrow around her growing body, compelling her to reckon with the violence entangled in its history. She was a professional dominatrix in New York City, a homestead farmer in a brutal relationship, a welder on a high-rise building crew, and a Mixed Martial Arts enthusiast; each of her many lives brought a new vantage point from which to see how power and masculinity coalesce and how her body paid the price. With unflinching candor, Steines searches for the roots of her erstwhile attraction to pain while charting the complicated triumph of tenderness and care."
The Writer in Residence program brings local authors to the Library to consult with writers of any age, experience, or genre. This program, generously funded by the Arizona State Library, is a favorite among local writers.