About this Event
Monona Wali:
In 1960 S. K. Sharma, a brilliant young astrophysicist at the beginning of his academic career, has finally succeeded in bringing his wife, Sushila, from India to America. Intensely drawn to one another as star university students, the couple pursue an unlikely affair and marriage that crosses caste lines. Their sweeping, decades-long story of love, forgiveness, and coming of age takes place in a country that is both fascinated by and shuns them. The United States, with its exaltation of individualism, offers immense opportunities, but its looser sexual mores threaten to undermine the family’s happiness and devotion to one another.
As their three daughters become young women, they must navigate the tumultuous decades of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the women’s liberation movement. In their journeys of self-discovery, they upend their parents’ hold on them to craft radically new identities for themselves. As they discover their parents’ faults they grow increasingly puzzled by their devotion to one another, eventually learning how love and forgiveness have the power to overcome the most uncomfortable truths.
Monona Wali is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, and filmmaker. Her debut novel, My Blue Skin Lover, won the Independent Book Publishers Gold award for multicultural fiction. Born in Benares, India, she now lives in Los Angeles, California.
Tess Gallagher:
Acclaimed poet, essayist, and short story writer, Tess Gallagher, will read from Surrounded by Weasels, the result of a decades-long collaboration between Gallagher and her late partner, the Irish painter and storyteller, Josie Gray. This luminous collection of stories and paintings from the Northwest of Ireland follows Gallagher and Gray’s beloved 2007 book, Barnacle Soup.
Surrounded by Weasels offers readers a second helping of Josie Gray’s singular wit, tenderness and vision underscored and imbued with Gallagher’s deft and lyrical cadence, resulting in a dance of imaginations. Sometimes comedic and always deeply humane, Gallagher’s writing re-vivifies and companions Josie’s oral stories to animate the characters, customs, and locations that shaped his keenly observed life.
“Josie often told stories while in motion,” Gallagher recalls — “walking with me by the Morse Creek near my home in Port Angeles, riding ferryboats, or trekking to the Pacific Ocean.” These tales, gathered between 1994 and 2006, were spoken before the hearth at Abbey Cottage in Ballindoon, Ireland, and at Sky and Ridge Houses in Washington state.
Before his death in 2017, Gray urged Gallagher to bring forward the stories that were not included in Barnacle Soup. Surrounded by Weasels is that promise fulfilled. Interspersed throughout the collection are original Josie Gray paintings, created in both Ireland and America. Gallagher’s foreword and afterword lend a riveting context to the collection.
Tess Gallagher, the author of eleven books of poetry, lives and writes in her hometown of Port Angeles, Washington, and in her cottage in Co. Sligo, Ireland. She is the only American to have been honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award for her poetry from the Foundation of Rome, which she received in 2023. Her most recent poetry collection Is, Is Not, published by Graywolf press, won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Gallagher participated in BIRDMAN and SHORT CUTS, films centered on the stories of her late husband, Raymond Carver. Her own collection, The Man from Kinvara: Selected Stories, published in 2009, is the basis for film episodes under development. She currently serves on the Board for the Friends of Theodore Roethke Foundation.
Gary Copeland Lilley:
Spirit in the Dark by Gary Copeland Lilley is a set of poems born in the blues of North Carolina and cultivated by the poet’s subsequent migrations, living in New York; South Carolina; Washington, DC; Chicago, and the Pacific Northwest. He is also a veteran of the US Navy Submarine Force. The collection somehow touches all of those places within its dynamic narrative: this is a storytelling from a kitchen table, a front porch, or riding in an automobile. The character-speak is the soundtrack the poet brings forward, the musicality is the language of these poems. That is a primary thematic element supporting each of these poems, and therefore the entire collection. Lilley makes an effective, powerful use of objective correlatives in his work. His chosen images, sets of objects, situations, symbols are utilized to create mood in his poems, to evoke/provoke specific emotional responses in the reader without the poet saying so directly; to turn ordinary moments into emotional experiences.
Gary Copeland Lilley’s intent is for his readers to not be just hearing these stories, but to be feeling them.
Feel free to reach out to Village Books and Paper Dreams for further assistance at 360-671-2626!
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