Thursday, May 30, 7PM
TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS
When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice
(Picador, 2013)
in conversation with
LINDA ASHER
"I am leaving you all my journals,
but you must promise me you won’t look at them until after I’m gone."
This is what Terry Tempest Williams’s mother, the matriarch of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah, told her a week before she died. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as it was to discover that the three shelves of journals were all blank. In fifty-four short chapters, Williams recounts memories of her mother, ponders her own faith, and contemplates the notion of absence and presence art and in our world. When Women Were Birds is a carefully crafted kaleidoscope that keeps turning around the question: What does it mean to have a voice?
Terry Tempest Williams has been called "a citizen writer," a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. She is the author of fourteen books, including Refuge, Leap, The Open Space of Democracy, and Finding Beauty in a Broken World.
Linda Asher is an internationally acclaimed translator of authors including Milan Kundera, Georges Simenon, and Honore de Balzac, and is a former fiction editor at The New Yorker.
***
Friday, May 31, 7PM
KAREN GREEN
Bough Down
(Siglio, 2013)
Please join us for a special book signing and reception between 7 and 8pm.
Karen Green has created a profoundly beautiful and intensely moving lament. In this unusual narrative constructed of crystalline fragments of prose interspersed with miniature collages, Green conjures the urgency and inscrutability of a world shaped by love and loss.
In charting her passage through grief, she summons memories and the machinations of the interior mind with poetic precision, a startling sense of humor, and an acute awareness of contradictory truths and of the volatility of language.
In counterpoint, tiny visual collages punctuate the text, made of salvaged language and scraps of the material world: pages torn from both beloved and obscure books; bits of love letters, medical records, condolences, and paper refuse; old postage stamps and the albums which classify them. Made not to illustrate the words but as a parallel process of invocation and erasure, pilfering and remaking, each collage—and the creative act of making it—evinces the reassembling of life.
Karen Green is an artist and writer living in Northern California.
An excerpt from Bough Down is featured in the Winter 2012-2013 issue of BOMB Magazine.
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