What we talk about when we talk about Lynn and Michael's books -- a discussion with Laura Furman, Lynn C. Miller, and Michael Parker.
Bookworks is very pleased to welcome authors Lynn C. Miller and Michael Parker for a reading and conversation about their new books with author Laura Furman.
About The Lost Archive, by Lynn C. Miller:
The characters—young and old, queer and straight, contemporary and historical—who inhabit Lynn C. Miller’s stories often find themselves in defining moments and crisis situations. As they search through the archives of memory, truth, and experience, they seek to understand not only the past and present but themselves. Stretching the definition of “archive,” Miller builds interconnected webs that surprise, much like the seemingly random papers collected in a box of materials. Fraught relationships, mistaken identities, mysterious disappearances, and the search for love play out in these stories. Friendships are celebrated, ex-husbands cross the line, and Gertrude Stein attempts to write her memoir. An unusual collection that proves greater than the sum of its parts, The Lost Archive will haunt readers with the intensity of its vision.
About I Am the Light of the World, by Michael Parker:
The searing and unforgettable story of one decision that irrevocably changes the course of a young man’s life: In the early 1970s, in Stovall, Texas, seventeen-year-old Earl—a loner, dreamer, lover of music and words—meets and is quickly infatuated with Tina, the new girl in town. Tina convinces Earl to drive her to see her mother in Austin, where Earl and Tina are quickly separated. Two days later, Earl is being questioned by the police about Tina’s disappearance and the blood in the trunk of his car. But Earl can’t remember what happened in Austin, and with little support from his working-class family, he is sentenced for a crime he did not commit. Forty years later, Earl is released into an America so changed that he can barely navigate it. Determined to have the life that was taken from him, he settles in a small town on the Oregon coast and struggles to overcome the emotional toll of incarceration. But just as Earl finds a chance to begin again, his past returns to endanger the new life he’s built. Steeped in the music and atmosphere of the 1970s, I Am the Light of This World is a gritty, gripping, and gorgeously written story of the impulsive choices of youth, redemption, mercy, and the power of the imagination.
Lynn C. Miller lives in Albuquerque and is a novelist and playwright, performer, and educator. Her published novels are The Unmasking, The Day After Death, The Fool's Journey, and Death of a Department Chair. She co-wrote Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir with the late Lisa-Lenard Cook, with whom she also founded the literary journal bosque, providing community in New Mexico for writers everywhere. Through Bosque Press, Lynn and Lynda Miller edit and publish a second magazine, ABQ Inprint. She has a B.A. from the University of North Dakota in English and theater, an M.A. from Northwestern University in performance studies, and a Ph.D. from the University of Southern California in communication and performance. Lynn has taught writing and performance at Penn State University, The University of Southern California, and the University of Texas at Austin, where she was Professor of Theatre and Dance. Her plays have been produced in Dublin, Austin, Tulsa, Albuquerque, Provincetown, Yaddo, and elsewhere. Lynn is married to Lynda Miller. They live in the North Valley and spend as much time as possible outside under the New Mexico sky.
Michael Parker is the author of eight novels – Hello Down There, Towns Without Rivers, Virginia Lovers, If You Want Me To Stay, The Watery Part of the World, All I Have In This World, Prairie Fever, and I Am the Light of This World -- and three collections of stories, The Geographical Cure, Don’t Make Me Stop Now and Everything, Then and Since. His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in numerous publications, including Five Points, the Georgia Review, The Southwest Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Oxford American, New England Review, Trail Runner, Runner’s World and Men's Journal. He has received fellowships in fiction from the North Carolina Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Hobson Award for Arts and Letters, the North Carolina Award for Literature and the 2020 Thomas Wolfe Prize. His work has been anthologized in the Pushcart and New Stories from the South anthologies, and he is a three-time winner of the O.Henry Award for short fiction. For nearly thirty years, he taught in the MFA Writing Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Since 2009 he has been on the faculty of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Laura Furman was born in Brooklyn, New York, and educated in New York City public schools, PS 75 and Hunter College High School. She graduated from Bennington College. After college she worked at Grove Press and then as a freelance copy editor for various New York publishing houses and the Menil Foundation. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976, and since then work has appeared in Yale Review, Epoch, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, American Scholar, and other magazines. Her books include three collections of short stories, two novels, and a memoir. Her most recent collection is The Mother Who Stayed. Laura Furman's received fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, Dobie Paisano Project, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 2002, she's been Series Editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories, published annually by Anchor Books. Each year she selects the twenty winning stories and writes an introduction. For many years, she taught at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is now professor emerita. Laura Furman lives in Austin with her husband Joel Warren Barna and their son.
