About this Event
Event guidelines:
- All attendees are strongly encouraged to wear a face mask at all times.
- Tickets are limited to restrict capacity.
- Additional copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
- A signing will follow the talk.
- Home address is collected for contact tracing purposes; it will not be used otherwise.
- The event will also be livestreamed on YouTube: https://youtube.com/live/27Hy7Lep4QU
- As a reminder: If you are not feeling well, please do not come to the event, even if you have a ticket; email us and we'll work it out.
If you have any questions regarding these guidelines or to request accessibility accommodations, please contact [email protected].
A vivid and inspiring poetry collection about what's possible when we heed our instincts and honor our intuition, allowing ourselves to strike out for new territories of love, pleasure, and peace.
"This empathetic, honest, and intimate collection is chock-full of poems reminding the reader to love earnestly, live freely, and pay attention."—Kate Baer, New York Times bestselling author of And Yet and What Kind of Woman
First you must realize you’re homesick for all the lives you’re not living. Then, you must commit to the road and the rising loneliness. To the sincere thrill of coming apart.
So begins Joy Sullivan’s Instructions for Traveling West— a lush debut collection that examines what happens when we leave home and leap into the deep unknown. Mid-pandemic, Sullivan left the man she planned to marry, sold her house, quit her corporate job, and drove west. This dazzling collection tells that story as it illuminates the questions haunting us all: What possible futures lie on the horizon? What happens when we heed the call of furious reinvention?
A book for anyone flinging themselves into fresh starts, Instructions for Traveling West grapples with loss, loneliness and belonging. These poems teach us that naming our desire is profound alchemy. Each of us holds the power to set our own course forward.
Expansive and heart-opening—exquisite in their specificity, galvanizing in their scope—the poems in Instructions for Traveling West speak to the longing that lives within us all. They remind us that “joy is not a trick.”
Joy Sullivan received an MA in poetry from Miami University and has served as the poet-in-residence for the Wexner Center for the Arts. She has guest-lectured in classrooms from Stanford University to Florida International University and is the founder of Sustenance, a community designed to help writers revitalize and nourish their craft. Read her thoughts on the creative life in her Substack newsletter, Necessary Salt.
Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
First Unitarian Congregational Society in Brooklyn, 119 Pierrepont Street, Brooklyn, United States
USD 10.00 to USD 22.00