Enjoy a visit with four authors who will read from their “queer and/or weird texts that appeal to readers with wild minds,” as Anna Joy Springer describes the event, a joint book tour with author Janice Lee. Springer (“The Vicious Red Relic, Love” and “The Birdwisher”) and Lee (“Daughter” and “Kerotakis”) will be at the Olympia Timberland Library on Monday, August 6 from 8:30 to 9:45 p.m. They will be joined by Jump Atlas of Olympia and Leon Baham of Seattle. Books will be available for purchase.
Springer’s memoir, “The Vicious Red Relic, Love,” re-enacts her relationship with a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she’d tested positive for HIV. Publisher Jaded Ibis Press describes the book: “Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.” Springer is a former band member of Blatz, The Gr’ups, and Cypher in the Snow. She is an Associate Professor at UC San Diego where she teaches experimental writing.
Lee is a writer, artist, editor, designer, curator, and scholar. Her website states: “Interested especially in the relationships between metaphors of consciousness, theoretical neuroscience, and experimental narrative, her creative work draws upon a wide variety of sources.” Lee was recently selected by John D’Agata as the Black Warrior Review Nonfiction Grand Prize winner. An excerpt from Lee’s new novel: “This is a story about an excavation,… a daughter and the body of a dead octopus in the desert. The body may be that of a dead god, and the daughter intends to shed some light on the situation.” Lee teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.
Leon Baham’s first chapbook is “Ponyboy, Sigh: A Word Problem,” a hybrid story-essay wherein “Ponyboy, of ‘The Outsiders’ fame, is submerged in a queer (un)consciousness that swims through the murky waters of desire, fear, love, brotherhood, race, violence, mothers, tenderness and memory.” Baham is currently working on his first long book titled “The Book of Imaginary Boys.”
Jump Atlas has just finished a rough draft of his first novel, “Broken Open Ending.” “Soon to be in the debt of a master’s degree,” as he says, Atlas “plans to hustle pizzeria shifts alongside teaching inmates how to break the rules of writing.”
The Olympia Timberland Library is at 313 8th Avenue SE. For more information, contact the library at (360) 352-0595 or go to www.TRL.org.
