free literary Q&A
Memento Mori
The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, with author joanna ebenstein
Join us and our community book club members for a live Q&A with Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy and author of Memento Mori - a transformative workbook that asks us to examine our relationship with mortality and befriend death. Together, we'll explore what it means to contemplate death as the key to living with greater meaning.
november 10 from 10:30am mT
held on Zoom
Joanna Ebenstein is a Brooklyn-based author, photographer, curator, and designer who founded Morbid Anatomy, and has authored many books. With Memento Mori, she's created a transformative workbook that turns the cultural taboo around death on its head - offering a 12-week program to create your own personal meditation on what it means to be mortal. The premise is simple but profound: contemplating death is the key to living a life with meaning.
Our book club members will be leading the Q&A alongside Lauren Carroll with questions that emerged from three months of working through Ebenstein's prompts. Whether you've read every page or are just curious about this work, you're welcome to join us. This is a conversation, not a lecture.
The La Mort / L’Amour Book Club is a space to explore literature that asks the big questions about death, grief, love, art, and the mysteries that give meaning to everything else. We read radical works that most people shy away from - books that examine mortality with unflinching honesty, that find beauty in grief, that challenge how we think about dying and living, and that build bridges between art, love, kinship, and death.
Come curious, and befriend mortality with us.
We can't wait to see you.
Live community Q&A
November 10 from 10:30am mT
held on Zoom
Your host
Lauren Carroll
Lauren Carroll, co-founder of La Mort, is a Death Educator & Holistic Funeral Director who is passionate about weaving community and family back into the death space. Her work centers around re-aligning our culture with Mother Earth and helping humans remember how to love one another. She is a former board member for the National Home Funeral Alliance and co-founded The Deathwives. She lives on an urban farm at the base of a mountain where she tends to her animals, raises her two children, and dances around bonfires on the full moon with friends while listening to Nick Cave.
Our Teaching / Learning / Creating Style at La Mort
We leave behind the polished, gate-keepy approach to education. We teach in ways that carry story and experience. We listen. We laugh (a lot). We go off-script sometimes. We cry (with you)(for those you’ve loved)(for those we’ve loved). We like science and studies and logical frameworks, but also mysticism and poetry and all that stuff. We really love to honor history and those who came before. We move through some serious curricula, but don’t take anything too seriously. We dedicate ourselves to seeing you, and want you to feel seen. We deeply honor our intuition and yours. We lead with integrity (always). And we welcome the odd-balls and misfits, because it takes one to know one.