Cat Pleska and Joel Peckham at Booktenders
July 11 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm
My Life in Water: a memoir in essays by Cat Pleska
“Strap on a life jacket and dive into this often perilous, at times funny, always poignant collection bubbling with the language of water. Ever present is the danger of drowning from inattentive caregivers, from white-water rapids or a bridge collapse into a roiling river. From fluid-filled lungs gasping with croup or pneumonia. But water also brings healing and an understanding that navigating tricky waters, whether literal or metaphorical, has made Cat the surest captain of her own life.” ~Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly.
Cat Pleska is a native West Virginian, and an award-winning author, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by West Virginia University Press. My Life in Water is published by Uncollected Press. Cat has edited four anthologies, and her stories and essays have appeared in Still: the Journal, The Appalachia Heritage Anthologies, Change Seven magazine, Heartwood Magazine, and many others. She teaches in the Marshall University English and Graduate Humanities Program departments.
“Strap on a life jacket and dive into this often perilous, at times funny, always poignant collection bubbling with the language of water. Ever present is the danger of drowning from inattentive caregivers, from white-water rapids or a bridge collapse into a roiling river. From fluid-filled lungs gasping with croup or pneumonia. But water also brings healing and an understanding that navigating tricky waters, whether literal or metaphorical, has made Cat the surest captain of her own life.” ~Marie Manilla, author of The Patron Saint of Ugly.
Cat Pleska is a native West Virginian, and an award-winning author, educator, and storyteller. Her memoir, Riding on Comets, was published by West Virginia University Press. My Life in Water is published by Uncollected Press. Cat has edited four anthologies, and her stories and essays have appeared in Still: the Journal, The Appalachia Heritage Anthologies, Change Seven magazine, Heartwood Magazine, and many others. She teaches in the Marshall University English and Graduate Humanities Program departments.
Gone the Sun by Joel Peckham
“If a book can be a song, the pages of Gone the Sun sing. They sing remembering and forgetting. Grief and Endurance. Present and past. In the present time of this memoir-in-fragments, Joel Peckham spends a last summer as music director at Manitou, the boys camp that has been part of his life since he was a child. Manitou summons Peckham’s past—his father, his lost wife, his lost son. But there are songs of redemption those weeks too. This is a book that sings both back and forward with love, urging us all home.” ~Karen Salyer McElmurray, author of Voice Lessons and Wanting Radiance
Joel Peckham has published eleven collections of poetry and nonfiction, most recently Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: new and selected poems (SFAU), Gone the Sun (UnCollected Press), and the spoken word LP, Still Running: Words and Music by Joel Peckham (EAT poems). With Robert Vivian, he also co-edited the anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose. He is an Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at Marshall University.
