Joan Marcus is a memoirist and essayist living in Ithaca. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Sun, Fourth Genre, Laurel Review, The Smart Set, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Georgia Review, Superstition Review, and elsewhere. Avoidant Type, her memoir-in-progress, tells the story of her decades-long struggle with medical anxiety. Part personal narrative, part cultural analysis, Avoidant Type chronicles her experience of embodied anxiety at a time when many Americans mistrust western medicine and embrace alternative treatments, even risky or unproven ones. During her residency at the Saltonstall Foundation, she will be working on the final section of this memoir.
She holds an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Arizona and teaches memoir, personal essay, fiction, and children’s literature in the Department of Writing at Ithaca College. When she isn’t writing, teaching, or hanging with her husband and grown daughters, she likes to get messy working with clay and digging in her vegetable garden, as well as hiking and kayaking. She works best when she can alternate uninterrupted reading and writing time with time outdoors, preferably in the forest.