An Afternoon of Poetry with Wayne Scott and Richie Hofmann
Wayne Scott and Richie Hofmann will discuss their books The Maps They Gave Us and A Hundred Lovers, respectively. A Q&A and book signing will follow the discussion.
At the Co-op
About the Authors: Wayne Scott’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, Huffington Post, The Psychotherapy Networker, The Oregonian, and The University of Chicago Magazine, among others. His New York Times essay, “Two Open Marriages in One Small Room” (January 2020) was adapted for the Modern Love podcast (summer 2021), then “dutchified” for Modern Love (Amsterdam), the television series, in 2022. He has been a Tin House Fellow. He is a writer, psychotherapist, and teacher in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his partner. His memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, is forthcoming from BLP in early 2025.Wayne Scott’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, Huffington Post, The Psychotherapy Networker, The Oregonian, and The University of Chicago Magazine, among others. His New York Times essay, “Two Open Marriages in One Small Room” (January 2020) was adapted for the Modern Love podcast (summer 2021), then “dutchified” for Modern Love (Amsterdam), the television series, in 2022. He has been a Tin House Fellow. He is a writer, psychotherapist, and teacher in Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his partner. His memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, is forthcoming from BLP in early 2025.
Richie Hofmann is also the author of A Hundred Lovers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022) and Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015). His poetry has appeared recently in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Yale Review, as well as the Best American Poetry anthology. His honors include the Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. The recipient of a 2025 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, he teaches at the University of Chicago.
About the The Maps They Gave Us: "Emotional, raw, and real, this memoir is a deep dive into one couple’s trials and triumphs to redefine marriage to fit their lives and needs. A valuable addition to memoir collections."
--Library Journal, starred review
Welcome to Will and Grace with kids, cats, and a mortgage.
In a memoir that celebrates the creative possibilities of intimate relationships, writer and psychotherapist Wayne Scott’s The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined is an unlikely love story: a distraught couple with three school-aged children, on their way to get a divorce, are surprised when they fall in love again.
In a voice at once vulnerable, tender, lucid, and funny, Wayne Scott offers the perspective of a queer (bisexual) man in a mixed-orientation marriage. After the couple separate, stunned and careening toward divorce—the expected outcome—they find themselves in a tiny room with a quirky and compassionate relationship therapist who offers them a challenge: find a “common story” about what brought them together to help them navigate the next iteration of their relationship.
Wayne Scott’s marriage memoir will appeal to readers who loved the messy rawness and emotional complexity of Molly Roden Winter’s More: A Memoir of Open Marriage—but queerer—suffused with an expansive sense of possibility and hope.
About A Hundred Lovers: A Hundred Lovers is a catalog of encounters, sublime, steamy, and frank. Inspired by French autofiction, the poems feel both sharp and diaristic; their lyrical, intimate world brings us everyday scenes imbued with sex. “Eros enters, where shame had lived,” the speaker observes, as the poems explore risk and appetite, promiscuity and violence, and, in the wake of his marriage, questions about monogamy and desire. Bringing us both the carefully knotted silk ties of the wedding pair and their undress in a series of Hockney-like interiors where passion colors every object, Hofmann speaks plainly of the saliva, tears, and guts of the carnal, just as he does of the sublime in works of art. A Hundred Lovers invites us to consider our own memories of pleasure and pain, which fill the generous white space the poet leaves open to us between his ravishing lines.
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