Book reading at Darvill’s
Published 3:09 pm Wednesday, October 8, 2014
Authors Melissa Hart and Ana Maria Spagna will read at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 14 at Darvill’s Bookstore. There will be hors d’eouvres, questions and answers and a book-signing.
The kickoff reading in Artsmith’s 2014-2015 Salon Series features the two writers who explore what it means to be human in the presence of the “wild.” Ana Maria Spagna’s nonfiction book, “Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness,” examines how different groups and cultures break bread and form bonds in everyday meals shared in settings ranging from weddings to funerals, political rallies to campfires. Hart’s memoir, “Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Saved a Family,” tells the story of a divorced and guarded working with owls and other raptors, who taught her to love, trust, and nurture again. Both books examine how humanity interacts with and is influenced by proximity to the wild in nature and in ourselves.
Ana Maria Spagna’s “Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness” was a finalist for the 2012 Washington State Book Award. She is the author of “Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey,” winner of the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw, named a Seattle Times Best Book of 2004. Her writing on nature, work, and life in a small community appears regularly in High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Oregon Quarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in Stehekin, Washington.
Melissa Hart is also the author “Gringa: A Contradictory Girlhood” (Seal, 2009). She’s a contributing editor at “The Writer,” and her articles and essays have appeared in High Country News, Orion, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Horizon Air Magazine, and numerous other publications.
