107 Capitol Way N Olympia Wa
Join us as we welcome Seattle-area writer Sarah C. Townsend in conversation with Alison Bailey. Sarah’s book is Setting the Wire which weaves together personal anecdote, film, music, visual art, and psychology to explore the author’s experience with postpartum psychosis. It’s a visceral reflection on the experience of fragmentation as a young psychotherapist and new mother.
“Sarah Townsend’s Setting the Wire is a tightly coiled and disturbingly gorgeous exploration of her postpartum mental breakdown,” says New York Times Best Selling writer Claire Dederer. “I devoured these pages—while willing myself to slow down so I could catch every nuance of Townsend’s taut, lyrical, wise writing.”
Sarah Townsend is the author of Setting the Wire: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis (The Lettered Streets Press, April 2019). Her essays have appeared in The Writer in the World and Pitkin Review, and a coauthored paper with Elisabeth Young-Bruehl serves as a chapter in Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women’s Lives. Sarah received her MFA in creative writing from Goddard College, her Master’s in counseling psychology from Northwestern University, and is a graduate of the College of Letters at Wesleyan University. She has recently been featured on the Beyond Well podcast with Sheila Hamilton, The Love You Give with Ali Tate Cutler and will be a guest for Season 3 of The Ish with Cameron Dezen Hammon. She writes and teaches in and around Seattle, WA.
Alison Bailey is a writer and professional print fanatic living in Olympia. She helped found the Lighthouse Writers Conference & Retreat and supports local writers with manuscript development and print publishing. She was an editor at The Pitkin Review and her work has appeared in VoiceCatcher. She earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in 2014 and continues to work on her fiction manuscript, The Evergreen Baby.
