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Old Firehouse Books is delighted to be bringing Megan O'Grady to the store to talk about her book, How It Feels to Be Alive: Encounters With Art and Ourselves! Megan will be joined by Nina McConigley in store on June 4th from 6:00-7:00PM to chat and sign books for people. Books are available for purchase in store or online! We can't wait to see you there!About How It Feels to be Alive:
A vital testament to how art makes us who we are--and offers new ways of seeing our world and our lives.
Barbara Kruger once defined art as "the ability to show and tell, through a kind of eloquent shorthand, how it feels to be alive." Testing that claim, How It Feels to Be Alive braids criticism with personal narrative to consider art's intimate effects and how it might help us find clarity in an uncertain world.
When Megan O'Grady was a teenager, she saw a photograph in a museum that changed her life. At the end of an early marriage, art stoked new ways of thinking about connection and transformation. As a new parent, it guided her to confront vulnerability and shame. Whether seeking a home or contending with crises personal, political, and ecological, art was a critical lifeline, a source of beauty, solace, and provocation.
Looking closely at five artworks and the context in which each was made--often drawing on personal conversations with the artists--O'Grady examines the work's rippling impact, implicating sometimes unexpected lineages and genres. How does art expand and redirect our imaginations and attention? When bottom-line or nihilistic thinking dominates our public sphere, what meanings and alternatives does it offer? A vital call to engage deeply, to see in new ways, and to rethink all that we take for granted, How It Feels to Be Alive inspires and exhorts, providing a template to think through the knottiest problems in our culture, our selves, and the connections between the two.
About Megan O'Grady:
Megan O’Grady is a critic and an essayist. She was a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine, where she created the Culture Therapist column. Her reviews and essays about art and life also appear in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review. She was a contributing editor at Vogue and a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Currently, she is an assistant professor of art and art history at the University of Colorado in Boulder, where she lives with her family.
About Nina McConigley:
Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. She is the author of the short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians and How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder. Her story collection was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, and The Asian American Literary Review, among others. In 2019-2020, she was the Walter Jackson Bate fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and is a 2022 recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Creative Writing Fellowship. The Denver Center for Performing Arts commissioned her play based on Cowboys and East Indians, which premieres in January 2026. She teaches at Colorado State University.
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