September 29: Kathryn Savage and Juliet Patterson
Minneapolis-based authors Kathryn Savage and Juliet Patterson will read from their new books of nonfiction Groundglass and Sinkhole. Hope to see you there!
Groundglass: An Essay by Kathryn Savage
“Could there be something humbling and revolutionary in understanding myself as a site of contamination?”
Groundglass takes shape atop a polluted aquifer in Minnesota, beside trains that haul fracked crude oil, as Kathryn Savage confronts the transgressions of U.S. Superfund sites and brownfields against land, groundwater, neighborhoods, and people. Drawing on her own experiences growing up on the fence lines of industry and the parallel realities of raising a young son while grieving a father dying of a cancer with known environmental risk factors, Savage traces concentric rings of connection—between our bodies, one another, our communities, and our ecosystem. She explores the porous boundary between self and environment, and the ambiguous yet growing body of evidence linking toxins to disease. Equal parts mourning poem and manifesto for environmental justice, Groundglass reminds us that no living thing exists on its own
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ISBN: 9781566896405
Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide by Juliet Patterson
A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family.In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father had died by suicide. His death was part of a disturbing pattern in her family. Her father's father had taken his own life; so had her mother's. Over the weeks and months that followed, grieving and in physical pain, Patterson kept returning to one question: Why? Why had her family lost so many men, so many fathers, and what lay beneath the silence that had taken hold?In three graceful movements, Patterson explores these questions. In the winter of her father's death, she struggles to make sense of the loss--sifting through the few belongings he left behind, looking to signs and symbols for meaning. As the spring thaw comes, she and her mother depart Minnesota for her father's burial in her parents' hometown of Pittsburg, Kansas. A once-prosperous town of promise and of violence, against people and the land, Pittsburg is now literally undermined by abandoned claims and sinkholes. There, Patterson carefully gathers evidence and radically imagines the final days of the grandfathers--one a fiery pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman--she never knew. And finally, she returns to her father: to the haunting subjects of goodbyes, of loss, and of how to break the cycle.A stunning elegy that vividly enacts Emily Dickinson's dictum to "tell it slant," Sinkhole richly layers personal, familial, political, and environmental histories to provide not answers but essential, heartbreaking truth.
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ISBN: 9781571311764
About the authors:
Kathryn Savage's writing has appeared in American Short Fiction, Ecotone Magazine, the Virginia Quarterly Review, BOMB, and the anthology Rewilding: Poems for the Environment. Recipient of the Academy of American Poets James Wright Prize, she has received support from fellowships and residencies including the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Minnesota State Arts Board, Ucross Foundation, and Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She lives with her family in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide (Milkweed Editions, September 2022) and two full-length poetry collections, Threnody, (Nightboat Books 2016), a finalist for the 2017 Audre Lorde Poetry Award, and The Truant Lover, (Nightboat Books, 2006), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award. A recipient of a 2011 Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in non-fiction, and a 2010 Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she has also been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minneapolis-based Creative Community Leadership Institute (formerly the Institute for Community and Creative Development). She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Olaf College and is also a faculty member of the college’s Environmental Conversation program. She lives in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi near the Great River Road with her partner, the writer Rachel Moritz, and their son.
38 Snelling Ave S
St Paul, MN 55105
United States