Event Description
PSB: Boston Edition is excited to welcome Brenda Miller to celebrate the release of her latest book, Love You, Bye. Ethan Gilsdorf will join Miller in conversation.
ABOUT LOVE YOU, BYE
A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller.
In Love You, Bye, award-winning author Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title—drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years—captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in the most ordinary expressions of love.
From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent, often finding that the sacred is embedded in the mundane. At the center of this collection lies the story of Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR & CONVERSATION PARTNER
Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections, including A Braided Heart: Essays on Writing and Form, Listening Against the Stone, and An Earlier Life, which received the Washington State Book Award for Memoir. Her work has received seven Pushcart Prizes. She co-authored, with Suzanne Paola, the textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction and co-wrote, with Holly J. Hughes, The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Western Washington University and lives in Bellingham, Washington.
Ethan Gilsdorf is a journalist, memoirist, critic, poet, teacher and geek, and author of the award-winning travel memoir investigation Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks: An Epic Quest for Reality Among Role Players, Online Gamers, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms. Based in Somerville, Massachusetts, he publishes travel, arts, and pop culture stories, essays and reviews regularly in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Salon.com, and wired.com and has published hundreds of articles in dozens of other magazines, newspapers, websites and guidebooks worldwide, including CNN.com, io9.com, Playboy, National Geographic Traveler, Psychology Today, Christian Science Monitor, San Francisco Chronicle, USA Today, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and Fodor's travel guides.
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