Writing the Past: A Reading & Conversation with Four Authors

A novelist, a short story writer, a nonfiction writer, and a poet come together to talk about the ways we document and explore history in contemporary literature. With an intriguing range of perspectives, Douglas R. Dechow, Rachel Hall, Anna Leahy, and Emily Gray Tedrowe will read excerpts from their most recent books and talk about how they grapple with history in their writing. Their work draws from women's history, the Holocaust, the Iraq War, and the space age in which many of us alive today came of age. The evening will invite readers to think about the ways we can grasp the meaning of events even as they slip into the past.

At 57th Street Books

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About Generation Space: A Love Story: Literary Nonfiction. Space. Science. For poet Anna Leahy and scientist Douglas R. Dechow, quintessential children of the Space Age, love for each other and love of space are inseparable. The moon landings, the shuttle program, the prospect of manned travel to Mars: each stop in humanity's journey to space has marked a step in their ongoing love affair with each other and the cosmos. Told by Anna and Doug in alternating chapters, part memoir and part homage to the unquenchable spirit of exploration, Generation Space is a charming, captivating celebration of the serendipitous power of a shared passion.

About Douglas R. Dechow: Douglas R. Dechow is the author of Generation Space: A Love Story (with Anna Leahy). He co-wrote The Craft of Librarian Instruction and co-edited Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson. His articles have appeared at The Atlantic, Scientific American, Fifth Wednesday Journal, and others, and he has been awarded residencies at Ragdale, the Norman Mailer Center, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. He is the Digital Humanities and Sciences Librarian at Chapman University and the curator of the Roger and Roberta Boisjoly Challenger Disaster Collection.

About Aperture: As the title suggests, Aperture opens gaps through which to see and hear the lives of imagined and actual women. This collection becomes a stage on which these women perform, and the poems play with notions of staging, with how we present ourselves and how we are perceived and represented by others. The stories and voices in Aperture "bend and come back again," telling the truth slant.

About Anna Leahy: Anna Leahy is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Aperture and Constituents of Matter, and two nonfiction books, Generation Space: A Love Story (with Douglas R. Dechow) and Tumor (forthcoming). Her essays won the annual literary awards from Ninth Letter and Dogwood in 2016. She teaches in the MFA and BFA programs at Chapman University, where she curates the Tabula Poetica reading series and edits the international journal TAB.

About Heirlooms: Stories: Fiction. Jewish Studies. Winner of the G. S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, selected by Marge Piercy. Heirlooms begins in the French seaside city of Saint-Malo, in 1939, and ends in the American Midwest in 1989. In these linked stories, the war reverberates through four generations of a Jewish family. Inspired by the author's family stories as well as extensive research, Heirlooms explores assumptions about love, duty, memory and truth.

About Rachel Hall: Rachel Hall is the author Heirlooms, selected by Marge Piercy for the G.S. Sharat Chandra book prize.  Hall’s stories and essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, Fifth Wednesday, Gettysburg Review, Natural Bridge, Water~Stone, and others. She has received awards and honors from Lilith, Glimmer Train, New Letters, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ragdale, and the Ox-Bow School of the Arts. She teaches creative writing and literature at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where she holds two Chancellor’s Awards for Excellence—one in teaching and one for her creative work.

About Blue Stars: A Novel: Emily Gray Tedrowe has written an extraordinary novel about ordinary people, a graceful and gritty portrayal of what it's like for the women whose husbands and sons are deployed in Iraq. Blue Stars brings to life the realities of the modern day home front: how to get through the daily challenges of motherhood and holding down a job while bearing the stress and uncertainty of war, when everything can change in an instant. It tells the story of Ellen, a Midwestern literature professor, who is drawn into the war when her legal ward Michael enlists as a Marine; and of Lacey, a proud Army wife who struggles to pay the bills and keep things going for her son while her husband is deployed. Ellen and Lacey cope with the fear and stress of a loved one at war while trying to get by in a society that often ignores or misunderstands what war means to women today. When Michael and Eddie are injured in Iraq, Ellen and Lacey's lives become intertwined in Walter Reed Army Hospital, where each woman must live while caring for her wounded soldier. They form an alliance, and an unlikely friendship, while helping each other survive the dislocated world of the army hospital. Whether that means fighting for proper care for their men, sharing a six-pack, or coping with irrevocable loss, Ellen and Lacey pool their strengths to make it through. In the end, both women are changed, not only by the war and its fallout, but by each other.

About Emily Gray Tedrowe: Emily Gray Tedrowe is the author of the novels Blue Stars and Commuters. Her short fiction has been published in the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Fifty-Two Stories, and Crab Orchard Review. Originally from New York City, Emily now lives in Chicago, where she teaches literature and creative writing at DePaul University.