For
Immediate Release
Contact:
City Art Director Joel Long: joeltlong@yahoo.com
Gerda
Saunders and Jennifer Tonge
to read
at City Art
Salt Lake Public Library Main Branch
210 East 400 South
Salt Lake City UT 84111
Wednesday April 5th, 7:00—8:00 P.M.
Writer Gerda Saunders and Poet Jennifer Tonge will read from their
works on Wednesday, April 5th at 7:00 p.m. at the Salt Lake City Public Library
as part of the City Art Reading Series. This event is free and open to the
public.
GERDA SAUNDERS: In 2010, just before her sixty-first birthday, former literature
professor Gerda Saunders was diagnosed with microvascular disease, the second
leading cause of dementia after Alzheimer’s. At Saunders’ early retirement
party, her colleagues presented her with a beautiful leather-bound journal.
Facing “the premature death of the mind,” she took to jotting down notes in the
journal about her daily misadventures– pots boiling dry on the stove, washing
her hair twice in an hour, forgetting to bake a casserole. She would come to
call these scribblings her “Dementia Field Notes.” Saunders became an anthropologist assigned to observe one member
of a strange tribe, the Dementers. “Like a true scientist,” she writes, “I
would be objective. No whining, wailing, or gnashing of the teeth. Just the
facts.” The result of Saunders’ extraordinary project – a sort of true-life
“Sill Alice” – is MEMORY’S LAST BREATH: Field Notes on My Dementia (Hachette
Books, June 13, 2017), an unsparing, beautifully written memoir about Gerda’s
experience as an intellectual person aware that her brain is betraying her.
MEMORY’S LAST BREATH is uncharted territory in the writing about dementia, a
diagnosis one in nine Americans will ultimately receive.
Gerda Saunders grew up in
South Africa, where she obtained a B.S. from the University of Pretoria. In
1984, she settled in Utah with her husband Peter and two children. After
receiving an English PhD from the University of Utah in 1996, she suffered the
corporate world before becoming the Associate Director of Gender Studies at her
alma mater, also teaching gender studies and English. SMU Press published her
stories Blessings on the Sheep Dog (2002), about which Nobel laureate J.M.
Coetzee said, “With cool intelligence, laconic wit, and deep feeling, Saunders
explores the moral chaos of South Africa and the pain of a new generation
of…exiles.” Now retired, she enjoys time with her husband Peter, children,
grandchildren, and made-in-America family. She is writing a memoir, Telling Who
I Am before I Forget: My Dementia. An excerpt from the memo was published in
the Winter 2013 edition of The Georgia Review and in March 2014 republished
online in Slate Magazine and the UK Independent.
Jennifer Tonge’s poems have
appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The New England Review, Denver Quarterly, and
elsewhere, and on Poetry Daily. She has received the Jay C. and Ruth
Halls Fellowship in Poetry from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, a
Work-study Scholarship and the Margaret Bridgman Scholarship in Poetry from the
Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The
Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Ucross Foundation, and The Djerassi
Resident Artists Program. She has served as poetry editor of Quarterly
West, as president of Writers at Work, and on the board of City Art.
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.
Joel Long