In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.

“All Is Leaf by John T. Price is a master class in the essay, demonstrating inspiring stylistic and emotional range. Hilarious and tender, it opens a redemptive view of home, self, family, and the natural world. Price shows how humor and pathos, nature and human nature, are two sides of the same remarkable leaf.”—Michael P. Branch, author, On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World’s Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer

“Kristine Langley Mahler’s Curing Season is a lovely and rapturous excavation and examination of the past, a lesson in writing oneself into history when it doesn’t offer you a space. Displaced, coming-of-age, estranged from tradition, feeling out-of-place, this is a voice that teaches us how to live in the aftermath: you may not recognize life as you are living it, mementos may not reveal themselves until after the fact, what we miss and mourn may be what harmed us in the past. In imaginative forms and gripping prose, Mahler leads us to the entombed interiors of loss and how to rewrite our stories so that we truly fit in.” –Jenny Boully, author of Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life

This event is cosponsored by Raccoon River Reading Series.