Brittany McLaughlin

Brittany McLaughlin (nee Ackerman) is a writer from Riverdale, New York. She earned her BA in English from Indiana University and graduated from Florida Atlantic University’s MFA program in Creative Writing. She is a Critical Studies instructor at AMDA College and Conservatory of the Performing Arts where she teaches Archetypal Psychology as well as Applied Logic and Critical Thinking. She was the 2017 Nonfiction Award Winner for Red Hen Press, as well as the AWP Intro Journals Project Award Nominee in 2015. She currently lives in Los Angeles, California.


All Books

A green background with a sideways profile of a face at the center and a group of people walking in a circle at the center of it, with black script that reads The Perpetual Motion Machine a memoir by Brittany Ackerman.
Order Now

The Perpetual Motion Machine

Brittany McLaughlin

Publication Date: November 20, 2018

$15.95 Tradepaper

ISBN: 978-1-59709-691-1

Description:

When my brother was in high school he attempted to build a perpetual motion machine to save the world. That machine was my brother’s experiment; this book is mine. It is in the text where I dissect our relationship and try to understand myself. In undertaking this project, I had to research, which meant looking at photo albums, interviewing my brother and parents, asking friends and family what I was like when I was little, etc. Like my brother once said after reading my work, We color these memories differently, I knew that in order to methodically calculate the moments I had to meticulously plot out what it was I was trying to say. In this way, the collection is like a science project. This book is how I will try to save my brother, or more largely how I will attempt to save the world by making people understand the pain we’ve all been through, the visceral pain that accompanies longing for some past impossibility. My preparation has been in the field and living through it, gathering notes, experiences, and findings; it has all been one giant experiment?to see if we could make it out alive.