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Kevin McIlvoy presents At the Gate of All Wonder

Nov 30 @ 6:00 pm – 7:00 pm

Malaprop's Bookstore/Cafe

Kevin McIlvoy presents At the Gate of All Wonder with Christine Hale author of A Piece of Sky, A Grain of Rice

About At the Gate of All Wonder:

Samantha Peabody, a seasoned bio-acoustician and eccentric recluse living in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest, recalls in this journal-like novel her year with two children who accompanied her in a “Sonic Adventure Program,” deep in the woods. While she relates the story of the love that develops between her and the children — despite her efforts to resist —Sam offers a ferociously honest confession of love’s demise. Twelve years earlier, she’d chosen to leave the world and permanently live alone. Yet spending time with the girls, eight-year-old Betty and six-year- old Janet, Sam must confront her conscience in light of an ever- expanding communion with the forest around them. McIlvoy’s sixth book is a novel of ideas and of character, the tale of an aging adult and two troubled children, and their shared journey to compassion. In its uncanny texture and structure, the novel contemplates the transformations possible for those who listen to — and truly hear — the sounds of wilderness, where one’s true nature sings.
Kevin McIlvoy’s previous novels are The Fifth Station (Collier, 1989), Hyssop (Harper Perennial, 1999), and Little Peg (Harper Perennial, 2000), and his most recent book is a set of linked prose pieces, 57 Octaves Below Middle C (Four Way, 2017). His short stories, collected in The Complete History of New Mexico (Graywolf, 2005), were featured in journals such as The Southern Review, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, and The Paris Review. He has taught writing for more than twenty-five years, previously at New Mexico State University, where he was editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol. He now teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Warren Wilson College and lives near Asheville, North Carolina.

About A Piece of Sky, a Grain of Rice: A Memoir in Four Meditations:

In this layered collage of memory within memory, Hale recreates for readers her kaleidoscopic experience of a decades-long journey to acceptance and insight. Writer, prodigal daughter, single parent, Buddhist disciple, and, late in midlife, a newlywed, she is transformed through an unconventional relationship with a female spiritual teacher and an odd ritual of repeated tattooing with her two young adult children. “Christine Hale’s evocation of the bewildering complexities of life as a mother, daughter, wife (and ex-wife), and student of Buddhism is both a poem and a letter to those she has worked so long and hard to understand. On a journey that takes her through emotional and actual hurricanes, love and cruelty, urgent losses, and painful gains, she climbs to sometimes unnervingly high altitudes as she experiences “the joy and the sorrow of samsara.” In beautiful, clear language, Hale explores the wounds life gives us, the wounds we give ourselves, and the long process of healing.” -Sarah Stone, author of The True Sources of the Nile Christine Hale is the author of a novel, Basil’s Dream (Livingston Press 2009); National Book Award finalist Joan Silber says, “Basil’s Dream…seems to prove fiction can go where other forms can’t.” Ms. Hale’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Arts & Letters, Spry, Still, Hippocampus, and Prime Number, among other journals. A fellow of MacDowell, Ucross, Hedgebrook, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she earned her MFA from Warren Wilson College. She teaches in the Antioch University-Los Angeles Low-Residency MFA Program as well as the Great Smokies Writing Program in Asheville, North Carolina, where she and her husband live.

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