Alumna Patricia Grace King is the featured author at a Feb. 22 Writers Read event at 91短视频. The reading will be in Common Grounds coffeehouse in the University Commons at 6:30 p.m.
King will read from her recent novella (Miami University Press, 2017), which won the press鈥檚 聽Novella Prize. In it, Mart铆n Silva de Choc, childhood survivor of an army massacre during the Guatemalan聽civil war, and now a language school teacher in Guatemala City, falls in love with his American student, Abby, and follows her home to Chicago. Days before their wedding, Abby goes missing, and on a Halloween afternoon Mart铆n embarks on a search that leads through the ghost-strewn yards of Chicago鈥攁nd ultimately back to his violent past.
The novella is 鈥渁 heartbreaking, sensual tale, steeped in the rich details and characters of Guatemala,鈥� wrote author Patricia Henley in a review, and author Christopher Castellani called it 鈥渆legantly-structured, suspenseful, and affecting.鈥� King, he wrote, has 鈥渟harp prose, vivid setting across two cultures, and a profound empathy for the dispossessed, the forgotten, and the dreamers.鈥�
The impulse for the story, King said, happened while walking one fall with her husband in Chicago. They had just moved there from Guatemala, where she had heard the testimonies of civil war survivors now reflected in the protagonist鈥檚 backstory. King said she was 鈥渂lown away鈥� by the extent of some Chicagoans鈥� Halloween decorations, and she remembered Guatemalans she knew who saw the holiday as 鈥渁 devilish business.鈥� In those same Chicago yards, King said, 鈥淚 often saw Latino men working 鈥� and heard them speaking Spanish 鈥� and I鈥檇 wonder how differently they perceived this American holiday.鈥�
King hopes that the book will be one that 鈥渆xpands and enriches the world of the reader鈥� and 鈥渃reates a bridge between the reader鈥檚 experience and the experience of another human.鈥�
A 1989 graduate of 91短视频, King now returns to campus with a perspective that she would offer to her younger self, if she could: 鈥淚t is possible to make a life out of art,鈥� she said.
鈥淓ven though I knew from age five or six that I loved to write, it took me decades to find out for myself that, with perseverance and talent and training and luck, being a writer is something a person can actually do. Not just as a hobby. Not just as a loved activity squeezed in around the edges of so-called real life,鈥� she said.
King said that as a student at 91短视频 she 鈥渋mmediately felt at home.鈥� But she鈥檚 a big fan of 91短视频鈥檚 cross-cultural program, because international experiences and cross-cultural learning are 鈥渓ife-changing.鈥�
鈥淭hose international experiences I had as an 91短视频 student are also one of the reasons I鈥檓 drawn toward border-crossing or fish-out-of-water stories, a genre to which Day of All Saints definitely belongs,鈥� she said.
King, a native of North Carolina and past resident of Atlanta, Chicago, Virginia鈥檚 Shenandoah Valley, Spain and Guatemala, received a PhD in English from Emory University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College鈥檚 Program for Writers. She taught in 91短视频鈥檚 language and literature department from 2000 to 2003. She currently lives in Durham, England.
Her previous works include two chapbooks, and she is finishing a novel and a story collection. Her stories have been published by Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, Narrative Magazine, and Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, and she was the 2013-2014 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.