ForImmediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong(a)yahoo.com
Deborah Reed, JeffMetcalf, and Max Werner to read at City Art
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday September 26th,7:00—8:00 P.M.
Authors Deborah Reed, Jeff Metcalf, and Max Werner sharetheir work at the Salt Lake City Public Library on Wednesday, September 26th at7:00 PM. This event is part of the City Art Reading Series.
Deborah Reed's new novel, The Days When BirdsCome Back, tells the story of June and Jameson. June returns to the Oregoncoast to decide what to do with her late grandparents' home while in transitionfrom her divorce, trying to stay sober, and faced with a completely stalledcareer. Jameson comes highly recommended to renovate the old house to sell. Hetoo struggles to redefine his marriage in the aftermath of tragic loss, and hisconversations with June about the house quickly turn to the personal. Sensingconnection, June and Jameson can’t seem to stop circling each other, shyingaway from hurt. But what can the future hold as long as they are gripped sofirmly by the past?
Deborah Reed is the author of fournovels: The Days When Birds Come Back, Olivay, Things We Set on Fire, andCarry Yourself Back to Me. She has also authored two popular thrillersunder the pen name Audrey Braun.
A storyteller and avid fly fisherman, JeffMetcalf is, for compelling personal reasons, an enhanced observer of the humancondition, who finds himself often in the streams of the American West. Notonly rivers run through the essays in Back Cast, his cancer does too. But so docamaraderie, adventures, reveling in nature and outdoor devotions, and thesheer bliss of focused engagement with the fish and the cast. Metcalf’s keenlyobserved companions are river guides, small-town locals, academics, and othercity folk, all like him among those who run to the river for solace and joy.
Jeff Metcalf is a professor of English at theUniversity of Utah and has been the recipient of numerous awards. His fictionand essays have appeared in local and national magazines and his most recentplay, A Slight Discomfort, has been widely staged in both the United States andEurope. His first collection of essays, Requiem for the Living, was the winnerof the 2012 Utah Division of Arts and Museums Original Writing Competition.
In his new book, The Bone Pile: Essays on Natureand Culture, Maximilian Werner uses the vehicles of fly fishing, every dayexperience, and some of our most sacred rituals to explore the origins andlimitations of our behavior and ideas. These essays range from thequasi-mystical to the polemical and from the polemical to the ecological.However different each of these essays may be, together they represent an incisivestudy of human and nonhuman life and of the environment that unites us.
Maximilian Werner has been teaching at theuniversity level for over twenty years and is currently an Assistant Professor(lecturer) in the Writing and Rhetoric Studies Department at the University ofUtah, where he teaches Professional Writing, Environmental Writing, and Writingabout War. He is an award-winning teacher and author of five books: The BonePile, Black River Dreams, a collection of literary fly fishing essays; the novelCrooked Creek; the memoir Gravity Hill, and the memoir/natural history Evolved:Chronicles of the Pleistocene Mind.
This event is made possible with support fromThe City Library, SL City Art, and Utah Humanities.
Mostfeatured readings are followed by an open reading.
Theevent is free and open to the public. City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City ArtsCouncil, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.
Joel Long
