Wellfleet Public Library

Cynthia Blakeley In Conversation with Lisa Mecham: The Innermost House

Raised in a nineteenth-century saltbox house in Wellfleet, Cynthia Blakeley was both surrounded by generations of immediate and extended family and isolated by the mysteries locked inside her affectionate yet elusive mother and short-fused father. While she and her sisters and cousins roamed the Outer Cape drinking in the dunes, swimming in kettle ponds, and dancing in Provincetown- Blakeley also turned to the inner world of her journals as she contended with her own secrets and memories. Blakeley's captivating memoir The Innermost House moves fluidly through time, grappling with the question of who owns a memory or secret and how our narrative choices not only describe but also shape and change us. In this insightful and poignant account of tenacious year-rounders on Cape Cod, Blakeley contends that making sense of ourselves is a collaborative affair, one that begins with understanding those we came from.

Cynthia Blakeley is a freelance academic editor and an instructor at Emory University in Atlanta, where she teaches courses on memory and memoir, interdisciplinary research, and theories of dream interpretation. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Cape Cod Voice, HerStry, and Dreamers Magazine. The Innermost House is her first book.

Lisa Mecham's work has appeared in The New York Times: Tiny Modern Love, Roxane Gay's bestselling anthology Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture, and Huffpost Personal. Her digital archive project, Finding Judy, is preserving and sharing the life of Judith Shahn- a prolific yet unsung artist of the mid-20th century with Outer Cape connections.