Montana author and writing mentor Sonja Mongar, will discuss her personal journeys and the imprint those travels made on her imagination as she presents “Writing Real Life into Fiction” on Saturday, June 23rd from 11AM-1PM.

When New Journalist, Truman Capote, penned the true story of the murder of a Midwest farm family in his 1959 novel, In Cold Blood, he coined the term "faction" to explain his creative license in turning fact into fiction. Since then, writing real life into fiction is a rapidly evolving cross-genre trend with sub-genres such as autofiction (fusion of autobiography and fiction), or novoir (fusion of memoir and fiction,) among others.

Sonja Mongar, MFA, journalist, creative non-fiction writer and professor of English will share her own process of writing her newly-released novel entitled Two Spoons of Bitter. The story is a novoir-style, originally based on a diary she kept while employed at a drug and alcohol rehab providing services to people living with AIDS during the initial AIDS crisis in the South in the early '90s. Topics to include: genre characteristics, truth vs. fact, subjects vs. characters, plot vs. non-fiction narrative, writing race and gender, dialect in dialogue, point of view, legal/ethical issues, and method writing among others.

Born a fifth generation Montanan, Mongar has been a traveler all her life which has made its imprint on the landscapes, characters, and dramas of her imagination. T?here will always be a train, a lost highway, a brooding river, and a character adrift in her stories.

Mongar was a tenured Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico where she "got schooled" on enduring friendships, the treachery of love, the language of ants and the art of hurricanes. She currently mentors writers in the Western Connecticut State Low Residency MFA in Creative and Professional Writing. She is a freelance journalist, photographer, blues harmonica player and occasional car auction driver, she currently writes in the Pacific Northwest, next to a river where she can hear the trains at night.

Montana Book & Toy Co will be on hand to sell books after Mongar’s presentation.