When:
Livid : Wednesday, July 26
6-8 PM Pacific
Unleashed: Wednesday, August 30,
6-8pm Pacific
This is an in-person event.
Where:
Wordcrafters Studio
436 Charnelton St. Ste 100
Eugene, OR 97401
HEALTH CONSIDERATIONS
Masks are optional. Please stay home if you’re unwell with any upper respiratory illness.
Wordcrafters is honored to host a two month book club celebrating Unleashed (2022) and Livid (2022) by the late and great local Eugene author, teacher, and playwright, Cai Emmons (1951-2023). Come talk about the craft behind her novels with her former students, colleagues, friends, and more. Everyone is welcome.
Cai facilitated Reading Like a Writer book talks with us in the past, critiqued first pages, and participated in our conferences. She means so much to so many.
About the Books:
Late July: Livid
Synopsis: Sybil White Brown returns from Boston to the small West Coast city where she once lived, hoping to heal after a terrible loss. Summoned to jury duty, she is dismayed to be assigned to the jury of a murder trial alongside her ex-husband with whom she had a rancorous divorce. As the trial progresses, she and her ex tiptoe around each other but eventually become disastrously entangled. Meanwhile, Sybil obsesses about the female defendant, whom she believes is innocent. The situation explodes during jury deliberations when Sybil comes face-to-face with her own unexpressed rage.
Facilitated by Leah Velez
Late August: Unleashed
Set amid California’s wildfire season, a vivid and magical novel following a family in crisis thrust on a collision course with the world around them that has an outcome beyond their wildest imaginings…At once a grounded story about love and family, and a transcendent tale about the power of nature, Unleashed is a stunning look at what matters in an all too chaotic world, the things that sustain us when we are on the verge of losing it all, and how we might find ourselves in the most unexpected of ways.
Facilitated by Amalia Gladhart
Purchase your copies from J Michaels books in advance! (If you’d like to participate and the cost of the books is prohibitive, we have a limited number of copies available. Please contact leah@wordcrafters.org to coordinate)
Questions about this event? Email us.
About Cai Emmons
Cai was an award-winning novelist, story writer, playwright, and essayist. A graduate of the University of Oregon’s MFA Program (1998), and later a teacher there, she published six novels and a collection of short stories. Her first book, His Mother’s Son, won the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel in 2003. Her second book, The Stylist, followed in 2007. Weather Woman (2018), the first of five books in her late-career renaissance, won the Nautilus Award. Her short story collection, Vanishing (2020), won the Leapfrog Press Fiction Contest. Sinking Islands (2021) continued and expanded the story started in Weather Woman. Remarkably, she wrote her novel Unleashed after the onset of ALS symptoms, and lived to see its publication, along with her final novel Livid, both in September 2022. Hours before her death, she sent a new novel to her agent.
A week after her diagnosis with bulbar-onset ALS in February 2021, she married her treasured partner of many years, Paul Calandrino, who cared for her tirelessly in her final years. She remained who she was—nice, yes, though also funny, brave, incisive, optimistic, joyful, devoted and creative—as her body gave out.
Cai generously recounted her ALS journey through her blog, sharing intimate and powerful essays about feminism, death, disability, and the writing process. She did hot yoga, kayaked, swam, hiked, and walked up until the very moment she could not. “I wanted to devour the world,” she wrote, “do it all, even with the end in sight.”
See more, and read her powerful end of life blog at caiemmonsauthor.com
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