Authors Melissa Falcon Field and Gary Lee Miller will read from their new work, take questions from the audience, and sign books.
Melissa Falcon Field is the author of the debut novel What Burns Away (Sourcebooks, January 2015). As an educator and curriculum developer, Melissa has instructed writing workshops at several universities and urban high schools, across the country, including The Madison Writers’ Studio in Wisconsin, where she now lives. In What Burns Away, Melissa studies the pull between forces—motherhood and self-possession, marriage and independence, nature and science, adversity and affluence, roots and displacement, the virtual world and intimacy, investigating characters torn between those influences just as their past intersects with their future.
Praise for What Burns Away:
“What Burns Away is a study of safety, loyalty, and heart. But it’s also the story of what happens when those things run up against boredom, when they gaze in the smoky glass of lost mirrors and see soulful shadows of passion, freedom, and risk. A new mom’s fiery first love is back, and he challenges all she’s built for herself, reveals the fragility of suburban dreams. In scorching prose, Melissa Falcon Field reminds us that when trouble flies out to the far reaches of the solar system, we’d best not forget it’s coming back.”
—Bill Roorbach, author of The Remedy for Love and Life Among Giants
Gary Lee Miller is the author of the short story collection Museum of the Americas (Fomite Press, 2014). A roadside museum with a link to the supernatural. A washed up pitching phenom remaking his life as a minor league mascot. An elderly magician concealing a devastating secret. A grown-up high school bully obsessed with her former classmate’s glass eye. In Museum of the Americas, Gary Lee Miller presents a remarkable collection of stories that push the boundaries between the real and the fantastic, the universe that is seen and the one that is invisible. There are no easy answers here, no moralistic judgments, just people struggling against stacked odds to bring redemption to their lives.
Praise for Museum of the Americas:
“Vivid and arresting: the stories have a gentle fabulism that grows darker as Miller plumbs the human psyche.”
— Steve Almond
“Most remarkable, perhaps, is that Museum of the Americas reveals the inner and outer lives of its characters in the manner of short-fiction geniuses like Munro and Trevor: that is, without rodomontade, without bells and whistles, without the least look-ma-no-hands gesture. We finish a given tale and find ourselves suddenly dazzled: how far we have ranged–how did we travel so widely without ever having quite been conscious of how we were transported? This collection represents art in its truest sense.”
— Sydney Lea, Vermont Poet Laureate