Bio

Christina Griffin is a native Californian, migrating from South to North multiple times. She has degrees in social work, religious studies, psychology, and psychoanalysis and has practiced for 25 years with individuals from all walks of life. She is Co-President of the International Forum of Psychoanalytic Education, a home for thinking and open discourse, characterized by a willingness to engage with both ideas and experience. She teaches Practicum to third year doctoral students at Pacifica Graduate Institute.  

A passion for reading broadly undergirds her writing creative non-fiction, fiction and memoir. She recently published, The Regulars’ Table, a novel about Hungarian psychoanalyst Ferenczi and his literati friendships. Her writing interests are the objects of desire, poetic memory and the tragic/romantic aspects of human subjectivity.

Project

The Faber thematic residency will provide the space for writing a novel, In Pursuit of the Tantalizing Object. What happens to someone when their deepest desire meets an unobtainable tantalizing object— arousing expectation but elusive beyond reach? Poetic memory, that part of us powerfully moved but thwarted by impossibility, equals loss.  Spiraling down the rabbit hole into a labyrinth without direction, is Nora. Catapulted into an unchosen odyssey, she becomes a restless vagabond reeling from a life altering experience — an unexpected deep love for a gay man. Creativity as a response to loss, she must discover the antidote.