For Immediate Release

Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com

Deborah Reed, Jeff Metcalf, and Max Werner to read at City Art

Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111

Wednesday September 26th, 7:00—8:00 P.M.

Authors Deborah Reed, Jeff Metcalf, and Max Werner share their work at the Salt Lake City Public Library on Wednesday, September 26th at 7:00 PM. This event is part of the City Art Reading Series.

Deborah Reed's new novel, The Days When Birds Come Back, tells the story of June and Jameson. June returns to the Oregon coast to decide what to do with her late grandparents' home while in transition from her divorce, trying to stay sober, and faced with a completely stalled career. Jameson comes highly recommended to renovate the old house to sell. He too struggles to redefine his marriage in the aftermath of tragic loss, and his conversations with June about the house quickly turn to the personal. Sensing connection, June and Jameson can’t seem to stop circling each other, shying away from hurt. But what can the future hold as long as they are gripped so firmly by the past?

Deborah Reed is the author of four novels: The Days When Birds Come Back, Olivay, Things We Set on Fire, and Carry Yourself Back to Me. She has also authored two popular thrillers under the pen name Audrey Braun. 

A storyteller and avid fly fisherman, Jeff Metcalf is, for compelling personal reasons, an enhanced observer of the human condition, who finds himself often in the streams of the American West. Not only rivers run through the essays in Back Cast, his cancer does too. But so do camaraderie, adventures, reveling in nature and outdoor devotions, and the sheer bliss of focused engagement with the fish and the cast. Metcalf’s keenly observed companions are river guides, small-town locals, academics, and other city folk, all like him among those who run to the river for solace and joy.

Jeff Metcalf is a professor of English at the University of Utah and has been the recipient of numerous awards. His fiction and essays have appeared in local and national magazines and his most recent play, A Slight Discomfort, has been widely staged in both the United States and Europe. His first collection of essays, Requiem for the Living, was the winner of the 2012 Utah Division of Arts and Museums Original Writing Competition.

In his new book, The Bone Pile: Essays on Nature and Culture, Maximilian Werner uses the vehicles of fly fishing, every day experience, and some of our most sacred rituals to explore the origins and limitations of our behavior and ideas. These essays range from the quasi-mystical to the polemical and from the polemical to the ecological. However different each of these essays may be, together they represent an incisive study of human and nonhuman life and of the environment that unites us.

Maximilian Werner has been teaching at the university level for over twenty years and is currently an Assistant Professor (lecturer) in the Writing and Rhetoric Studies Department at the University of Utah, where he teaches Professional Writing, Environmental Writing, and Writing about War. He is an award-winning teacher and author of five books: The Bone Pile, Black River Dreams, a collection of literary fly fishing essays; the novel Crooked Creek; the memoir Gravity Hill, and the memoir/natural history Evolved: Chronicles of the Pleistocene Mind.

This event is made possible with support from The City Library, SL City Art, and Utah Humanities.

Most featured readings are followed by an open reading.

The event is free and open to the public.  City Art is sponsored by the Utah Arts Council, the Salt Lake City Arts Council, Zoo, Arts, and Parks, X-mission, and audience donations.