The Creative Imagination: Santa Barbara Literary Festival

Two masterful storytellers come together for an illuminating conversation on the alchemy of historical fiction. Paula McLain (The Paris Wife, When the Stars Go Dark) and Dawn Tripp (Georgia, Jackie) explore how writers transform archival fragments, lived realities, and emotional truth into immersive, resonant narratives.

In this wide-ranging discussion, McLain and Tripp will reflect on their creative processes, the ethical and imaginative responsibilities of writing about real lives, and the unique power of historical fiction to restore forgotten voices, deepen empathy, and help readers understand both the past and the present. They’ll examine how research becomes art, how character shapes history, and how storytelling can transcend time to reveal enduring human truths.

A compelling event for readers, writers, and lovers of history, this conversation invites audiences into the minds of two acclaimed novelists who are redefining what historical fiction can do—and why it matters now more than ever.

Paula McLain was born in Fresno, California and spent the majority of her childhood in foster care. After aging out of the system, she supported herself in a variety of minimum wage jobs before discovering that she could and very much wanted to write. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and is the author of six novels, including The New York Times and international bestseller, The Paris Wife. She is also the author of two collections of poetry and a memoir. Her latest offering is Skylark, which is the Good Morning America Book Club Pick for January.

Dawn Tripp is the nationally bestselling author of five novels. Her most recent, Jackie, a fictionalized biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, was longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award and won the San Diego Writers Historical Fiction Award. She is also the author of Georgia, finalist for the New England Book Award and winner of the Mary Lynn Kotz Award for Art in Literature from the Library of Virginia. Previous novels include Game of Secrets, Moon Tide, and The Season of Open Water, which won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Harvard Review, Conjunctions, NPR, and others. Her books have been published into a dozen languages. She graduated from Harvard and lives on the Massachusetts coast with her sons.