"The South End Writes" Continues with Romance Novelist Saundra MacKay (April 12), Followed by Ross Terrill (4/26); Michelle Hoover (5/3); Monica Collins (5/3) and Jenna Blum (6/24)

Saundra MacKay, a long-time South End resident who describes herself as a former “fat child,” will talk about her debut romance novel, The Measure of Love on Tuesday, April 12 at 6:30 PM. A devotee of the romance novel, MacKay, who holds a gradual degree in education with an emphasis on social justice, hopes to start a conversation about the prevalence of size-intolerance as demonstrated by, among other things, the lack of full-sized heroines in romance publishing. The Measure of Love is the story of Vanessa, a career woman who finds herself in a body the voluptuous size of which she senses is not particularly valued in our slim-obsessed modern society, but who is nevertheless juggling the love interests of two very different men. Find out what the author, who grew from a plus-sized teen into a large-sized adult, has to say about what she describes as “the mystique and splendor” of the women of size of today, and feel free to weigh in with tales of your own.

What Does China Want? you may have asked yourself, watching the latest military and economic developments involving America’s second-most-important trading partner (after Canada) and not-infrequent political adversary. Renowned China specialist Ross Terrill will be at the South End library on April 26 to talk about what he calls The China Challenge, and touch upon the latest conundrums posed by the once-locked-away empire that is now deeply intertwined in the global culture. Terrill, a South End resident, is the author of innumerable articles and many books, including The Chinese Empire; Biography of Mao; China in Our Time: The Epic Saga of the People’s Republic from the Communist Victory to Tiananmen Square and Beyond; Madame Mao; and  The New Chinese Empire –winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in 2004. A Research Associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, Terrill was a contributing editor at The Atlantic Monthly in the 1970s, when he won the National Magazine Award for Reporting Excellence and the George Polk Memorial Award for Outstanding Magazine Reporting for writings on China. Raised in rural Australia, he also also wrote The Australians. He has visited China almost every year for many years; within China, his biography of Mao, in Chinese translation, has sold more than 1.5 million copies. Terrill has recently been visiting professor at the University of Texas, Austin, and at Monash University in Australia.

michelle hoover

Michelle Hoover’s two novels, The Quickening and Bottomlands, are both set in America’s rural heartland in the early 20th century. She will discuss them in a talk at the library on May 3. The Quickening, based on a great-grandmother’s journal, describes an unlikely friendship between two women in a time of harsh economic realities. In addition to being shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize, it was a Massachusetts Book Award Must Read pick. Her latest, Bottomlands, is the story of a German-American family living in Iowa after the First World War, a time of strong anti-German sentiments. Struggling to survive as farmers, they are trying to piece together why their two teenage daughters vanished in the middle of a night. Hoover is the Fannie Hurst Writer-in-Residence at Brandeis University and teaches at GrubStreet, where she leads the Novel Incubator program. She is a 2014 NEA Fellow and has been a Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University, a MacDowell Fellow, and a winner of the PEN/New England Discovery Award. Born in Iowa, she lives in Boston.

Or is it the reverse? You can find out May 31 at the library. Monica Collins is The Dog Lady whose columndog lady, Ask Dog Lady, appears in many publications, including The South End News, Cleveland’s Plain Dealer, The Cambridge Chronicle and Salem News. A former staff writer for USA Today, TV Guide, and The Boston Herald, Collins writes on her web site that she changed her journalistic focus from TV critic to lifestyle columnist after she acquired a West Highland white terrier. She has answered pet owners’ most confounding questions involving relationships, dog park etiquette, divorce, custody complications, and whether the dog belongs in your marital (or single) bed. One reader wanted to know why an earlier advice-seeker should not have mentioned in a job interview that the garment she was wearing that day had been knit from her dog’s hair (yes, you guessed it: Too much information). With annual pet spending reaching close to $60 billion a year and American households owning almost 60 million dogs, Collins is barking down from the right tree, no doubt, and you can bark up hers at the library to receive her typically compassionate, intelligent and culturally resonant answers to your canine questions.

Jenna Blum, the acclaimed author of the award-winning New York Times bestseller, Those Who Saved Us (2004), and The Stormchasers (2010) will talk about her latest work on June 24. It is a novella called The Lucky One, published in the new anthology coming out in June, called Grand Central. A collection of stories related to the Holocaust by ten bestselling female writers, Blum’s contribution was one she had been reluctant to write as it meant returning to the subject of the Holocaust. She says on her web site that the research and writing of Those Who Saved Us, which explored how non-Jewish Germans dealt with the Holocaust, was a searing experience. But she remembered one story she had heard when she worked for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation, where she interviewed Holocaust survivors. It had struck a cord with her, she said, and became the genesis for The Lucky One. It is set, like each of the stories in the anthology, on the same day in Grand Central Terminal right after the Second World War. Blum’s successful writing career began when she was fourteen, and her first short story won a third prize when it was published in Seventeen Magazine. Another short story, The Legacy of Frank Finklestein, won first prize two years later. Since that time, Blum’s work has been featured in Faultline, The Kenyon Review, The Bellingham Review, Glamour, Mademoiselle, and The Improper Bostonian. Blum has taught creative writing and communications writing at Boston University, was the editor at Boston University’s AGNI literary magazine for four years, and led fiction and novel workshops for Grub Street Writers in Boston since 1997.

A Book Talk by Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot about "Exits: The Endings that Set us Free" Brings on Questions about Youth Violence, Parents' Fears and How to Console Grieving Children

When Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot returned to the South End library for another one of her popular talks in early March, the subject was how we leave, exit, depart or retreat from our daily interactions, whether personal, professional, or merely neighborly. Author of the 2012 Exits: The Endings that Set Us Free, Lawrence-Lightfoot told her audience that she had always been curious about leave-takings, large and small. "Our culture applauds beginnings," she said , favoring a "tilt to the future" and a "readiness to seize opportunity." Exits are therefore seen as "negative spaces," as a "time to move on," often in the dark of night.

Lawrence-Lightfoot in discussion with a member of the audience

The long-time South End resident, who holds the Emily Hargroves Fisher Endowed Chair of Education at Harvard University where she has been on the faculty since 1972, finds the culture's disregard for exits "troublesome."  Especially because, she says, we have a society where leaving is so prevalent, as evidenced by a divorce rate of fifty percent, and so many immigrants who had to leave much behind. "The history of the United States is defined by  leave-takings," Lawrence-Lightfoot pointed out, "by the slaves' and native Americans' forced departures," as well as by other forces, often beyond our control, like economic crises or global and natural disasters.

FOSEL board member Kim Clark introducing Professor Sara Lawrence Lightfoot

Lawrence-Lightfoot, the recipient of many prestigious prizes and awards and the author of ten books, said she is intrigued by the ordinary, daily exits as well as bigger ones, such as the rupture of friendships, the departure of children for college. She said when her own son, now 33 and "a strapping handsome black man" leaves the house, she tells him,  "be careful," and is holding her breath. "Will I see him again?" she always wonders, or "is it the last time?"

"Managing the big goodbyes must be relational to the small ones, so it matters how exits are practiced,"  said Lawrence-Lightfoot, who won a MacArthur Prize in 1984 and was named the Margaret Mead Fellow by the Academy of Political and Social Sciences in 2008. "So do the rituals that accompany them, how one ends and another begins. Is it a victory or a defeat, or is it both?" She emphasized the importance of revisiting  how an ending happens, what provoked it to occur at that moment, and how was it communicated and to whom? "Exits are accompanied by feelings of loss as well as liberation, and it is worthy of deep exploration," she added.

Professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot emphasizing a point in her latest book, "Exits: The Endings that Set Us Free"

Her children, too, became interested in the subject, she said, asking her how she said goodbye to her students at the end of the semester. Her daughter suggested she "stop sounding like a mom." Her son proposed she put her farewell in a song, advice she took: Lawrence-Lightfoot, whose  chair endowed at Harvard will be re-named the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Chair of Education upon her retirement, has sung farewells to her students ever since, a ritual she also engages in when giving talks and during book tours.

The author signs a book for an admiring neighbor

During the question-and-answer session, a woman in the audience stood up, saying she had six children, some in high school, whose friends recently died violent deaths from shootings and car crashes. She doesn’t know how to give advice to them, she said, tearing up. How should she talk with them about these endings? Lawrence-Lightfoot said she had no magic words but suggested it would be important to do a lot of talking about it, to go to the memorial services and be quiet so the children will talk. "They need to be part of the weeping community, and pay attention to the power of ritual, ceremony," she said. "It is horrific to see young persons die like that, but you have to let your children see that you are grieving with them."

And then Professor Lawrence-Lightfoot sang her goodbye to the audience at the South End library with the Song of Jeremiah from Iliad.She introduced it by explaining it was transformed as a negro spiritual from There’s No Balm in Gilead to There Is a Balm in Gilead: To make the wounded whole; There's power enough in heaven; To cure a sin-sick soul. 

The author's next book, Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers, will come out in the fall of this year. Lawrence-Lightfoot has agreed to return to the library to talk about it at that time.

Author Paul McLean Will Talk about His Book "Blood Lines: Fatherhood, Faith and Love in the Time of Stem Cells," Tuesday, April 5 at 6:30 PM

What do you do when your seven-year-old daughter is diagnosed with a potentially fatal blood disease about which you know nothing and which requires making decisions that may determine her living or dying?Paul McLean, a former sportswriter at the Los Angeles Daily News, one-time arts editor at The Boston Herald and a stay-at-home father after his daughter was born, courageously fought to protect his child, preserve his sense of self even when it seemed everything changed by the day and, with his wife, made those difficult decisions. He also took meticulous notes, and wrote about his searing experience. Blood Lines: Fatherhood, Faith and Love in the Time of Stem Cells is the harrowing and honest account of who he once was --a regular guy with a regular family, and who he had to become as a result of the existential threat to his child.

McLean is the social media coordinator for the Harvard Community Ethics Committee (CEC), a former fellow in the Center for Bioethics program, a current community member of the Ethics Advisory Committee at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Research Subject Advocacy Board of Harvard Catalyst. He is also a social media contributor to The Hastings Center. He is a regular contributor to WBUR's on-line magazine, Cognoscenti.The South End Library is fully handicapped accessible. Seating is limited. The event is free. Books will be available for purchase, signing by the author, and borrow

Acclaimed Harvard Sociologist and South End Resident, Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, Will Talk about Her Most Recent Book, "Exits: The Endings That Set Us Free," Tuesday, March 8 at 6:30 PM

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot at her home in the South End

Three years ago, when Harvard professor Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot walked the 142 steps from her home to the South End library to talk about her previous work (The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50), she mentioned her next book coming out later that year, titled, Exits: The Endings That Set us Free. She described it as an exploration of the premise that our society is pre-occupied with beginnings. "We ignore the departures," she said. Looking at many kinds of exits, from the voluntary to the forced, she found that endings can be a process that unlock regenerative powers "that set us free." On Tuesday, March 3, Lawrence-Lightfoot who won a MacArthur Prize for her work in 1984, will read from Exits. The title of her new book, due out in the fall, is called Growing Each Other Up: When Our Children Become Our Teachers. You can ask her about that, too.

Lawrence-Lightfoot is the Emily Hargroves Fisher professor of Education at Harvard University, and a fellow at the Bunting Institute and at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.  The renowned sociologist' books include, among others, Beyond Bias: Perspectives on Classrooms (1979) (with Jean Carew); The Good High School: Portraits of Character and Culture (1983), which received the 1984 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association; Balm In Gilead: Journey of A Healer (1988), which won the 1988 Christopher Award, for literary merit and humanitarian achievement; I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (1994); and The Third Chapter: Risk, Passion, and Adventure in the Twenty-Five Years After 50 (2009). Upon her retirement from Harvard University, the endowed chair currently held by Lawrence-Lightfoot will officially become the Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot Endowed Chair, making her the first African-American woman in Harvard’s history to have an endowed professorship named in her honor.

The South End Library is fully handicapped accessible. Seating is limited. The event is free. We offer refreshments. Books will be available for sale, signing, and borrowing from the library. 

Boston Globe Spotlight Reporter Steve Kurkjian Wants to Know "How We Can Get Boston to Feel the Loss" and "Rally the Troops" to Recover the Art Stolen From the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990

"Can we get Marty Walsh in front of it? Or Cardinal O'Malley?" a frustrated Boston Globe Spotlight reporter Stephen Kurkjian asked the overflow audience that had come to listen to him talk about his almost two-decades' long investigation into the unsolved theft of 13 priceless   works of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In describing his disappointment over the lack of resolution after a 26-year hunt for the art, Kurkjian wanted ideas on how to re-ignite  the public's interest. He recalled a French detective who told him that when nine priceless Impressionists paintings, including a masterpiece by Monet, were stolen in 1985 from the Marmottan Museum in Paris, it was felt as a loss for every Parisian. "We got tip after tip after tip," the detective had said. "For you," he added, referring to the Gardner's art heist, "it's a cold case." Five years after the Paris theft, the French art was recovered, in Corsica. Twenty-six years after the Isabella Stewart Gardner plunder, the question in Boston still is "where is the art work?" "We don't feel this," lamented Kurkjian. "How can we get Boston to feel it?"

Rembrandt's only known seascape, stolen from the Garner Museum

For Kurkjian, whose deeply reported Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the Greatest Art Heist in the World, came out last year, the loss of this art is personal. His father, an artist, was inspired by the Old Masters of the Gardner Museum. Two cousins, classical pianists, regularly performed at the Gardner's popular Sunday concert series. Kurkjian himself attended Boston Latin, across the street from the museum, and revered the extraordinary collection that resulted from the grand vision of its 19th-century founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner. "She put those pieces on the walls for us, " he said. "She filled up her houses on Beacon Street with European art, but didn't stop there. She understood civilizations survive because of their artistic achievement. She wanted to give the United States a tradition it didn't have yet. When the museum opened in 1903, it was free. She wanted to inspire America into the arts."

Former Boston Globe reporter M. E. Malone introducing the author

Kurkjian was introduced by former Boston Globe reporter M.E. Malone, who was hired by him "fresh out of college." Even as she described him as a Founding Father of the Spotlight Team, a Pulitzer-prize winner who knows Boston and what closets which skeletons are in, she assured the audience Kurkjian also applied his investigative skills to less glamorous subjects, such as when in 1982 the Registry of Motor Vehicles decided to replace free driver's license manuals with ones that cost $1. "Steve thought that was outrageous," she told the laughing audience. Kurkjian quickly discovered there were still 505,470 free manuals in the DMV's warehouse, as well as piles of them under the counters and in closets of some DMV offices. Within a short time during which DMV personnel could not find a logical explanation for the charge, the Boston Globe reported that the DMV had made free driver's license manuals available again.

Of all the accolades bestowed on Kurkjian, his father, the artist, told him that solving "Boston's last best secret" would be the crowning achievement of his career. "I thought the 25th anniversary would be the year," Kurkjian said. "There was a lot of publicity. My book came out. Ann Hawley, the Gardner museum director who labored with this loss, retired," and there was now a $5 million reward  for the recovery. In addition, a new Boston FBI prosecutor reviewed videotapes of the night before the theft, and discovered that a stranger was let into the museum 24 hours earlier, against the rules. "We hoped for an essential tip," Kurkjian said after reporting it. But none has led to the discovery of the art, yet.  "These artworks were for the haves and the have-nots," Kurkjian stressed. "Our kids haven't seen them. We have to rally the troops. How do you motivate them?"

Stephen Kurkjian discussing his book, Master Thieves: The Boston Gangsters Who Pulled Off the Greatest Art heist in the World.

Virginia Pye, Reading from Her Second Novel, "Dreams of the Red Phoenix," Says the Archives of Her Grandparents, Missionaries in North China, Are the Inspiration for Her Literary Work

When Virginia Pye came to the South End library last month to talk about her second novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix, she brought along a slide show of compelling photographs of North China she had found in her grandparents' home. They date from the first decades of the 20th century, during the rise of Communism, when the Pyes were Congregational missionaries in Shanxi Province. In one of them, a tall man stands with his wife behind a small child. He happens to be Pye's grandfather, Orson. He was among the first Westerners who returned after the Boxer Rebellion, when the Chinese had tried to rid their country of Western influence. He met his wife there, Gertrude, who had come to China on her own at age 25, from Ohio, where she had studied early childhood education at Oberlin College.

Virginia Pye's grandparents as missionaries, and father, age 4, in North China in the 1920s. Courtesy Virginia Pye.

The little boy is the author's father, Lucian Pye, who later became a famous China scholar, and taught at MIT for decades. "When I wrote the novels, I kept those pictures by my side because they inspired the stories I wrote," Pye told the audience. Growing up in Belmont, MA, in the 1960s, Pye disavowed her family's missionary background, repelled by US imperialism, and opposed to the Vietnam War, which her father supported. She wrote other novels, but eventually found herself going through her grandfather's papers and discovered a more complex story than she had initially assumed. This archive became the inspiration for Pye's first novel, the highly praised River of Dust, which was chosen as an Indie Next Pick and was a finalist in the 2014 Virginia Literary Awards.

Author Virginia Pye signing her book for admirers who came to hear her talk.

He was a "beautiful writer," she said, "an erudite man who wove Shakespeare and Dickens into his reports home about his mission, as he envisioned it." Her grandfather raised funds in America to have a road built so the Red Cross could deliver food to a population starving from years of drought, Pye learned. Their young daughter died of dysentary at age six, when her father, the little boy in the picture, was four. Orson Pye himself died of tuberculosis not long after, in 1926. "Through fiction, I dealt with how my grandparents weathered one disaster after another, and had to re-examine their faith," said Pye.

Her second China novel, Dreams of the Red Phoenix --named Best Book of 2015 by the Richmond Dispatch-- was inspired by a family story: After Japan invaded China, her grandmother had fearlessly chased Japanese soldiers off her front porch in the Chinese mission compound with a broom. Widowed, Gertrude eventually returned to the United States with her teenage son in 1942, after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Unlike her husband, Gertrude did not leave a written record. But Pye was able to imagine details of those days when she came across journals by the pro-Communist US journalist Agnes Smedley, who had followed the Red Army and reported about it for English-language newspapers.

Pye, who returned with her family to the Boston area from Richmond, VA, when her husband was named executive director of the Di Cordova Museum, is currently working on the third and final novel in the China series, a personal odyssey of sorts, called Sleepwalking to China. While River of Dust and Dreams of the Red Phoenix played out against events experienced by her grandparents in North China before and after the First World War, respectively, Sleepwalking takes place during the anti-Vietnam era and the fall of Saigon, which she lived through herself. "Then I may be done with my China novels," Pye commented.

The desert-like landscape of North China in the 1920s. Courtesy Virginia Pye.

New York Times Bestselling Novelist, J. Courtney Sullivan, Will Read from Her Latest Book, "The Engagements," at the South End Library, Tuesday, December 3, at 6:30 PM

J Courtney Fitzg

Right after the Thanksgiving holiday, on Tuesday, December 3, TheSouth End Writes will host  the last author of the year 2013, J. Courtney Sullivan. The bestselling novelist's previous novel, Maine (2011), was named the Time Magazine Best Book of the Year as well as a Washington Post Notable Book. The writer's 2009 novel, Commencements, about four Smith College dorm mates together at a wedding for the first time four years after graduation, was described by the New York Times as that year's most inviting summer novel.

Sullivan will read from her new work of fiction, The Engagements, at the South End Library. Spanning almost a hundred years, the novel describes four marriages, each one vastly different from the other, but likely engagingly recognizable to most observers of, or participants in, the marital dance. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Chicago Tribune,New York Magazine, Elle, Glamour, Allure, Men’s Vogue, and the New York Observer, among others. She is a contributor to the essay anthology The Secret Currency of Love and co-editor of Click: When We Knew We Were Feminists. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. The author will be introduced by novelist and South End resident Sue Miller, who invited Sullivan to speak at The South End Writes.

The event is sponsored by FOSEL and, thanks to your contributions, free. We offer refreshments. The author’s books will be available for purchase and borrowing. The library is fully handicapped accessible thanks to FOSEL’s fundraising. The library is located on Tremont Street between West Newton Street and Rutland Square. Seating is limited so come  early. 

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Distinguished Biographer Megan Marshall Shines a Light on Margaret Fuller's 19th-century Struggle for Professional Success but Sara DiVello's Career Memoir Presents a 21st-Century Twist on it

The inclusive embrace of public libraries as a venue for all voices was on full display this month when, in less than a week's time, two authors who could not have been more different talked about the working lives of women, albeit two centuries apart. On November 13, acclaimed biographer Megan Marshall, (her 2005 biography of  the Peabody Sisters was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize) read from her most recent work, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life.  It describes the epic struggle the brilliant 19th-century author and women's rights advocate waged to find her place among professional equals who, in those days, were mostly men.

The despairing question Fuller asked of herself in the 1830s, how to ply her talents despite the severe restrictions her gender imposed, was answered by biographer Marshall's cheerful recounting of what the highly educated Fuller accomplished before her untimely death at forty in 1850: supporting herself and her family financially after her father's death by teaching and writing; editing the prestigious Transcendentalist magazine The Dial; organizing subscription-based consciousness-raising workshops for women called 'Conversations'; publishing the influential book, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and being the first female correspondent for The New York Tribune. The paper's editor sent Fuller to Italy where she covered the Italian revolution and the 1849 siege of Rome. After having found the institution of marriage lacking, moreover, Fuller married for love rather than financial security: to an impoverished Italian count, years younger than she, with whom she had a child out of wedlock. Marshall, who in the 1980s used to live around the corner from the South End branch at Rutland Square, while doing research at the Massachusetts Historical Society, called Fuller's life 'cinematic.'

Back to the 21st century where writer and yoga teacher Sara DiVello, who presented for South End Writes a week later, did not have to face the despair Fuller did about where or whether she could find work.  Home schooled, from a family without means, DiVello put herself through college by working five days a week. She did well the thirteen years she spent in the male-dominated corporate world, she told a packed library audience, except for one thing: her female bosses. One of them, 'Vomiting Vicky' was eventually replaced by an even worse supervisor, at which point DiVello quit to become a yoga teacher. But the author of the career memoir, Where in the Om Am I?, found that, in the yoga world, bullying, cliques and mean-spirited tactics by her female colleagues thrived, just as they did in the financial services industry she had left behind. In a lament that echoes a March 2013  Wall Street Journal article about 'queen bee bosses,' DeVello told her listeners she believed that "one of the reasons women make 70 cents for each dollar men earn is because women don't support one another,"  The Worcester Street resident clarified in a subsequent conversation that other factors matter, too, for example, that women don't ask for the same dollar as men, as well as their child-bearing and child-rearing dilemmas.

"Among girls and women there's a sense of false scarcity," DiVello elaborated. They are programmed to want to have the prettiest face, the best boyfriend --preferably the one and only captain of the football team-- and hang on to the few high-powered jobs occupied by women, she added. The evening ended with DiVello demonstrating simple yoga exercises for the audience, many of whom munched on her delicious cookies. "I am Italian," the yoga teacher said, "which means I'm compelled to feed you."

Doug Bauer Draws an Appreciative Audience When Reading about "Matters of Life and Death" from His Essay Collection, "What Happens Next?"

When Doug Bauer read the essay, Tenacity, from his new collection What Happens Next: Matters of Life and Death earlier this month, you could hear a pin drop in the upstairs room at the South End library. No surprise, really, as the author's observations of tenacity illuminated and brought home forcefully the physical expression of it in this finely woven tale: the tenacity of his widowed mother living alone, who fell, and took 12 hours to crawl the 15 steps to the phone to dial for help; the tenacity of the homeless men at the Pine Street Inn he used to volunteer at who, years later, still are alive on his street corner despite the 'dog years' of abuse from alcohol, weather and drugs; and the tenacity of his own aging body shown from the inside on the doctor's office's video monitors, revealing the miraculous sloshing of his heart's rhythmic pumpings "working away on my behalf, without notice or complaint."

All of it was suffused with Bauer's delicious details of place: Iowa, where in his family's cemetery gravestones  rise up "like a bumper winter crop;" the South End, with its collection of artists-occupied warehouses right next to the scattering of homeless shelters; the doctor's office, where the "oddly intimate and deeply alien sensation" of the technician navigating a jelly-slathered device over his chest seems "like impossibly cautious sci-fi foreplay."

Doug Bauer speaking with one of his admirers

Bauer told his audience he doesn't keep journals, for the most part, but trusts his memory for the details which may not be "exactly true," he  said. Writing from memory, he had a couple of hundred pages of materials for the essays, using every scrap to make them fit cohesively into the narrative's 'collage.'  Audience questions ranged from literary technique to specific health-related questions to advice on future ventures. "Any suggestions for our mothers?" an audience member wondered after reflecting on the details of  Bauer's mother's fall and subsequent death. "It's an inspiring book on the subject of women's health," said another. "You have such a soothing reading voice: have you ever done books on tape?" a third one wanted to know.

The author is currently working on a novel, his fourth.

Comedic Legal Wagwit Jay Wexler Takes Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, on a Quest to Do the "Crazy Things" Job Security Should Encourage

Ed Tuttle’s mid-life crisis takes place when he’s been an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court. He’s no longer at ease with his life, questioning even the meaning of language. He recognizes this is a problematic development in general but particularly in the wordy field of law. But his wife is dead; his daughter, the famous chef, occupied with her culinary challenges, so at the end of the Court’s term, when his colleagues depart on their routine law junkets in Venice and Paris, Tuttle decides to go to Jackson Hole, where fly-fishing is the unknown attraction. He discovers that, while famous in name, his life lived outside of the judicial robe requires constant explanation of what it is, exactly, that he does inside the Court to the befuddled characters he encounters on the Snake River. Or the importance of  it, something Tuttle had begun to wonder about himself.  Take Jackie, with whom he has pretty good sex in the motel after a day spent mostly untangling fish wire: “I can’t believe,” Jackie whispers, “that I ate an elk steak and did it with a Supreme Court Justice on the same night.”

Author and BU Law Professor Jay Wexler speaking at the South End library

No surprise to hear Jay Wexler, the author of The Adventures of Ed Tuttle, Associate Justice, once had a dream to be a sit-com writer. He may yet get there, since his sharply pitched sense of comedic timing and gesture created laughter and chuckles throughout his performance on October 1, when he read from recent work at the South End Library. Wexler's work ponders the subject of people like him, a tenured professor of law at BU or, for that matter, Supreme Court Justices who have the job security to stretch themselves beyond normally acceptable boundaries but continue to live traditional lives as if nothing changed. “They could do crazy things,” Wexler commented with apparent regret, “but associate justices don’t. And I am interested in how that plays.”

Apart from his solid –“but boring” according to Wexler himself—academic writings, Wexler’s previous work includes Holy Hullabaloos, a trip to the battlegrounds of church/state wars, and The Odd Clauses, a look at, yes, the odd clauses in the US Constitution.

Danielle Legros Georges's Reading of her Recent Work Ranged Far and Wide, Including Translations from the French of Haitian Poet Ida Faubert

The first South End Writes guest of the season, Danielle Legros Georges, found a small but attentive audience that, by the time the reading was over, had become mesmerized by the poet's performance. Novelist Sue Miller, who introduced the Haitian-born writer she first met while serving with her on the Pen New England board, characterized the poet's 2001 book, Maroon, as one "it was necessary to have,"  the poems giving her "more pleasure each time I read them." Miller described Legros Georges's poems as deeply varied in both tone and subject, ranging from the ironic to the elegiac to the openly political; from the diaspora of the immigrant experience to the simple act of showering with a lover. Legros Georges read from Maroon, as well as newer work, including poetry by the 19th-century Haitian poet, Ida Faubert. Legros Georges, who is also an essayist and translator, read these first in French, then in English. Faubert was a daughter of a colonial Haitian president in the late 19th century, and is considered a major author in Haiti's literary cannon. She received the prestigious Chevalier de l'Ordre Honneur et Merite from the French government in 1956.

DLG

A powerful rendition of a poem Legros Georges composed about the catastrophic 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Intersection, consisted of one phrase, read some dozen times at varied intensity, with the poet's hands slowly rising. The phrase was, The earth shook; a portal opened; I walked though it. For those few minutes, the audience walked through the portal with Legros Georges, known for her dynamic performances, into the ash and earth.

The South End Writeshas booked another poet, Colin D. Halloran, who served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2006.  A former public school teacher, Colin works with students and teachers to find ways in which poetry can inform the media’s and historians’ portrayals of war. His debut collection of poems, Shortly Thereafter, won the 2012 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award. His reading is scheduled for Tuesday, April 8, 2014.

Phil Gambone's June 18 Talk Tracing His Father's WWII Route Concluded the 2012-2013 SE Writes; New Season to Resume September 10 with Poet Danielle LeGros Georges

Among the bric-a-brac left by author Phil Gambone's  father, a soldier in the Fifth Armored Victory Division that landed in Normandy in July 1944, were a handful of souvenir maps of the route the soldiers took when they fought themselves across occupied Europe, from Utah Beach to Berlin. But when they actually did the fighting and dying, they didn't know where they were. It was a closely held secret until they received the souvenir maps when the war was over in May 1945. War secrets ended, but silence about the war took its place. The father was unable to speak of what he experienced during that war; the son acquired silences of his own, as a gay man, and a student at Harvard during the 1960s who was opposed to the Vietnam War. Unfolding the story embedded in his father's war mementos and the unfinished business of who father and son were as men became the subject of Gambone's latest book-in-progress, As Far As I Can Tell: Retracing my Father's WWII Route Across Europe. 

Phil Gambone -2-

As the last author of the 2012-2013 South End Writes series, Gambone described his father as a man of few words, even before the war. He was too shy to ask the vivacious young woman who became  Gambone's mother to marry him: she had to ask (and he immediately accepted). While other GIs sent copious mail home, Gambone's dad left a paltry record of six greeting cards. Gambone since discovered that the reluctance to talk about the war is universal among veterans, even those who fought the so-called good war that brought victory. "There seemed to be no way to connect the carnage they had seen with the civil life they lived afterward," Gambone told the spell-bound audience at the South End Library in June. "Your father said the war was horrible," his mother told him. But in retracing the route of the Fifth Armored in Europe during several trips in the last few years, Gambone said his  father revealed himself  as a man of courage and stamina, and the author began to berate himself for the lack of attention he had paid paid to his dad.

They would meet regularly at The Wursthaus in Cambridge for lunch, but Gambone said he felt they didn't have a lot in common. "The lunches were uncomfortable, stiff," he said. "I wish now we'd talked more but then our conversations were perfunctory." The quest to understand his father became one about finding himself and discovering his own values. He reminded himself that despite the vast destruction that played out in Europe during the Second World War, the same continent was also known for what it had built in previous centuries: transportation networks, exquisite buildings, museums, cathedrals, bridges. Following in his father's steps, he also had to acknowledge what it was that he himself valued, what he one day might want to fight for, thereby, as he put it, " unlocking the silence of each of the men we came to be."

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Poet Danielle Legros Georges

The next SOUTH END WRITES series will resume Tuesday, September 10, with a reading by Haitian-American poet Danielle Legros Georges.  The essayist and translator is the author of a book of poems, Maroon (Curbstone Press, 2001). Her work has appeared

in numerous literary journals and anthologies, and been featured on National Public Radio, The Bill Moyers Journal (PBS), and The Voice of America programs. Her awards for writing include MacDowell Colony and LEF fellowships, and the PEN New England Discovery Award. She is a visiting faculty member of the William Joiner Center, University of Massachusetts Boston, and leads the Greater Brockton Society for Poetry and the Arts Poetry Workshop.

FOSEL HAS ALSO BOOKED THE FOLLOWING AUTHORS:

Tuesday, October 1: George Cuddy, who wrote the e-book Where Hash Rules, about Charlie's Sandwich Shoppe  on Columbus Avenue, famous for many reasons, most recently the visit by President Barack Obama who ordered a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato,  mustard and fries to go, while in town for a fundraiser.

Tuesday, October 22: bestselling thriller writer Joe Finder, author of among other books Paranoia, Company Men, Killer Instinct and Power Play. The movie version of Paranoia is scheduled for release in a theater near you in August.  It is directed by Robert Luketic and stars Liam Hemsworth, Gary Oldman, Harrison Ford, Lucas Till, Amber Heard, Embeth Davidtz, Julian McMahon, Josh Holloway and Richard Dreyfuss.

Wednesday, November 13: Megan Marshall,  author of the award-winning The Peabody Sisters, will read from her most recent biography, the widely praised Margaret Fuller: a New American Life. Those of you who attended the dynamic SEWrites reading by April Bernard(Miss Fuller) in February may recall her admiring comments about the upcoming Fuller biography by Marshall.

Tuesday, December 3: J. Courtney Sullivan, bestselling author and former New York Times writer whose novels include Commencement,Maine  -- winner of the Best Book of the Year by Time magazine-- and, most recently, The Engagegements.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014: South Ender Christopher Castellani, whose recent novel All This Talk of Love got a great review in the New York Times Book Review earlier this year. Previous work includes A Kiss from Maddalena, winner of the 2004 Massachusetts Book Award, and The Saint of Lost Things, a BookkSense Notable Award. Castellani is the artistic director of Boston's creative-writing center Grub Street.

Tuesday, February 25: novelist, short-story writer, editor and teacher of creative writing, Michael Lowenthal will read fromhis most recent The Paternity Test, which describes the voyage of a gay couple trying to save a marriage by having a baby. His previous work includes Charity Girl and The Same Embrace. During Lowenthal's valedictorian speech at Dartmouth College in 1990, he revealed he was gay, prompting The Dartmouth Review to editorialize that he had 'ruined the ceremony.' The New York Times reported he received a standing ovation, however, so all was not lost.

Filmmaker Alice Stone Returns to "The South End Writes" With an Update on Her Documentary, "Angelo Unwritten" Tuesday June 11 at 6:30 PM

South End filmmaker Alice Stone will present what may be the final installment of her feature-length documentary, "Angelo Unwritten," on Tuesday, June 11 at 6:30 PM at the South End Library. Examining the complicated path of a Latino youngster, Angelo, who is placed in foster care with a Caucasian couple at age 12 , the film puts a compelling spotlight on what goes into the making of a family in the context of foster care. The focus has been on his biological family who couldn't care for him,  the social workers who defended Angelo's interests as they saw it, and the fiercely loyal foster parents who often groped in the dark for the right answers on how to raise Angelo. In that, most parents viewing the movie will find kinship with those who loved, cared for and were exasperated by Angelo.

Stone's 2012 video clips told the tale of of Angelo having been removed from his foster home at age 17, after the teen had started getting into trouble. The foster parents asked for a routine five-day respite, but it turned into a seven-month separation, against their wishes. Angelo since rejoined his foster parents but, at age 18, is no longer technically in their custody. Nevertheless, they are trying to become a family again. The documentary will follow the family as Angelo makes his way toward high school graduation this year. A Boston Globe's reviewer of  last year's video clip of  Angelo Unwritten  described it as "a not uncommon tale of a child adopted out of foster care who runs into a host of difficulties growing up. The film so far is crisply edited and deeply felt, but this is just a nine-minute snippet of what looks like an epic tale that will no doubt be challenging to put together." Filmmaker Stone recently raised funds through Kickstart for this documentary.

Alice and Angelo

Alice Stone graduated from Harvard College and made the 1994 short film about women motorcyclists, She Lives to Ride. She created a reality television series, Ding Dong Feng Shui, and has written and directed four comedy shorts, two of which continue to screen at the Coolidge Corner Theater in Brookline, MA. The author of four screenplays, Stone co-wrote and edited the documentary feature, Goodbye Baby (New Day Films), about international adoption from the Guatemalan perspective, and edited the feature, No Turning Back, about a human rights activist. She began her career editing political music videos for Peter Gabriel, Jackson Browne and others, and was an assistant editor on The Silence of the Lambs and The Crucible, among other projects.

The next and final reading of the 2012/2013 South End Writes season is Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m. when Philip Gambone,  the South End author of Travels in a Gay Nation; Beijng: a Novel;  and The Language We Use Up Here, will present his most recent work-in-progress, As Far As I Can Tell:  Tracing the World War II Route of My Father Across Europe. Gambone has just returned from his third trip to Europe shadowing the footsteps of his father who never spoke about his war experience.

South End Writes Speakers Dennis Lehane (5/14) and Alice Hoffman (5/21) Say Having Access to Public Libraries as Children Was Critical to Their Development as Writers

In closely timed appearances at the South End Library this month, two very different but equally successful Boston-based authors singled out community libraries as institutions that gave them the unique chance to find themselves as readers, thinkers and writers."I'm here because of the library," was the unequivocal statement Dennis Lehanemade before a standing-room only crowd in mid-May. "It's like A plus B is C. If you remove B, I wouldn't be here."

Alice Hoffman seconded he motion a week later before another standing-room only crowd at the South End branch when she said, "It gave me a special feeling when I could take out as many books as I wanted from my library in Melbourne on Long Island. That's how I was able to choose other worlds. I was an escapist reader, as I am an escapist writer."

Dennis Lehane and fans at the South End Library

Dennis Lehane choose not to read from his recent novel, Live by Night, but instead talked about what it took to turn himself into a writer. "Ten thousand hours," he said. "That's what it takes to become good." Lehane said he came from a literary family. "They were storytellers," he explained. "We'd visit relatives on weekends, and they'd tell stories. Eight weeks later, they'd tell the same stories, except they'd be different. They had tweaked them." At a local bar where his father would take him for a ginger ale with a straw, storytelling was a blood sport with little tolerance for a slow-moving tale. "Turn the set back on Jimmy," customers would shout when they heard an inauthentic or unfocused account. What would carry the day was the authentic tragedies of the working class he came from, leavened by humor: "I got screwed. But I keyed his car. And I slept with his sister. And told her brother about it." Finally, Lehane said, there was nothing else he could do except make up stories and get people to believe them. "My fear was I’d end up serving beers at Vaughn’s and someone’d say, ‘Hey Hemingway, pour me another Bud.’"  Reading urban novels by writers like Richard Price --The Wanderers, Clocker-- changed his life. The characters were a revelation, he said. "I knew those people, what was in their kitchens," Lehane said. "I'd found my subject."

"Many authors talk about themselves but I like to escape from my life," commented Alice Hoffman when describing her writing life a week later. She added she realizes "increasingly how autobiographical my work actually is." By way of explaining both the escape attempt and the discovery her work may be about her life after all, Hoffman took as an example an earlier novel, The Ice Queen. "It's about a girl struck by lightning who survived it. I may have been writing about myself, as a survivor, of cancer. But I removed myself from the circumstances of it,” she said. "Often the writer is the last to know what the book is about.”

Alice Hoffman signing books at the library

The genus of The Dovekeepers was hearing from a guide while visiting her son, an archeologist working in Israel, that there might have been women survivors from the siege in Massada.“That’s when I knew I had a novel,” she said. “These were my themes: love, loss, survival, and women in war who need to protect their children." Visiting Massada in the summer when it was 105 degrees and no one else was there, she found the experience "so mystical, it was as if I could almost hear the women,” she said. A nearby museum with many artifacts from those times further brought the people who lived there to life.“There’s a lack of women’s voices in history,” Hoffman observed: in The Dovekeepers the four female narrators describe their lives at Massada, and the intertwining arts of magic, herbs, medicine, and even witchcraft which, though outlawed, was the territory of women. It took Hoffman five years to write this book. “Had I known how much research I’d needed to do for The Dovekeepers, I never would have done it,” she said. She found a mentor in Richard Elliott Friedman, a biblical scholar at the University of Georgia who happened to be a visiting scholar at Brandeis where Hoffman teaches. “It was a huge gift to have a mentor. It changed my life and my career,” she said. “Whenever I had a question, he’d say, ‘don’t worry, I’ll call my rabbi.’”

Hoffman's next book is a “really little non-fiction book,” she said, which talks about ten things to do when you’re diagnosed with breast cancer. The author helped found the Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital. The five favorite books of Dennis Lehane and Alice Hoffman can be found under The South End Reads tab.

Never Mind the Global Perspective: Locals Flock to the South End Branch Library to Listen to Authors Who Write About Their Town

Barbara Shapiro Signing Books

When the day begins with the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the South End News, invariably I go for the neighborhood paper first. I am not alone in my skewed judgment: local wins. At the South End Library's most recent readings, local won again when, small and large, but always enthusiastic audiences listened intently to two authors talking about their very different books, both playing in Boston. April 23 saw Joe Gallo present a slideshow about his outstanding illustrated guide to local public sculptures and reliefs, Boston Bronze and Stone Speak to Us;  a week later, South End author Barbara Shapiro talked to a standing-room only audience about her 2012 suspense thriller The Art Forger, set in Boston and based on the theft of half a billion dollars worth of art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990.

Joe Gallo, Next to the Women's Memorial Pedestal

Joe Gallo researched, wrote and published his book after walking through the city made him curious about its public art.  He'd had a successful career as an educator and entrepreneur and wanted "to give back to the public." The self-published  Boston Bronze and Stone Speak to Us is an excellent guide to the city's sculptures and statues, with beautiful photographs, informative maps showing numbered stars linking sculptures to page numbers for easy exploration. The impassioned author likes to point out that the three women depicted in the Boston Women's Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue --Lucy Stone, Abigail Adams and Phyllis Wheatley--  lean on and stand against their pedestals but none stand ON them...Gallo hopes to publish another edition of his book, in which he hopes to include at least some of the many works of public art he could not put in the current version.

Barbara Shapiro's sixth novel, The Art Forger, was picked up by a publisher other than herself, "after 26 years in the trenches," as she put it. Standing in front of a spellbound  audience, she debunked Virginia Woolf's belief that women need "a room of their own" to write in: "All I needed was a working husband with benefits," she said. She is now returning the favor to him, she added. While she was at it, she sent another notion sailing, too, namely  "to only write what you know." "After my 11th novel I ran out of things I knew. I wanted to write what I could learn about, " she told the amused audience. Thus, she immersed herself in the life of "Belle," as she came to call Isabelle Stewart Gardner, and the mind-numbing theft of 13 works of her collected art, none of which found, none of which insured (could there be a connection?). Moving to the South End eight years ago where she  became involved with the local art community, plus an accidental Google link to the words "art forgery," finally allowed Shapiro to combine the four story strands that had been playing in her head.  She wrote an enthralling tale of wealthy Bostonians, struggling artists, the art forgery world and art theft, all set in our town. Her next novel is in an editor's hands so..stay tuned. Shapiro's five favorite books are listed under the South End Reads tab on this web site.

NEXT SOUTH END WRITES READINGS:

Tuesday, May 14, 6:30 p.m.

Dennis Lehane

The spectacularly successful author who grew up in Dorchester and is ALSO one of the nine BPL trustees, last week won the 2013 Edgar Award for his latest novel, Live by Night. Set in Boston in the 1920s, the New York Times’ reviewer called the book a “sentence-by-sentence pleasure.” The Edgars are named for the poet Edgar Allen Poe, and given to the best writers of mystery fiction, non-fiction and television. Previous novels include, among others, Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island and Mystic River --all made into fabulous movies-- and  The Given Day.

Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Hoffman

Alice Hoffman has published a total of twenty-one novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her novel, Here on Earth, an Oprah Book Club choice, was a modern reworking of some of the themes of Emily Bronte’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights. Hoffman’s work has been published in more than twenty translations and some one hundred foreign editions. Her novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. The distinguished author wrote the original screenplay “Independence Day,” a film starring Kathleen Quinlan and Diane Wiest. Her teen novel. Aquamarine, was made into a film starring Emma Roberts. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares and other magazines. Her latest,  The Dovekeepers, a historical novel describing the AD70 massacre at Masada from the point of view of four women at the fortress before it fell during the Jewish-Roman war, is the most recent of the nearly two dozen novels by Hoffman and just came out in paperback. She will be introduced at this talk by another distinguished writer, Sue Miller.

Tuesday, June 11, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Stone,

the local filmmaker whose mesmerizing documentary, Angelo Unwritten, has followed the life of a teenager adopted out of foster care when he was twelve, will return with an update of new material gathered since December 2011.

Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m.

Philip Gambone

will return to read from his current work-in-progress, retracing the steps of his father who, as a soldier, was sent to Europe during the Second World War.

After a Sad Week in Boston, FOSEL Resumes its Author Series Tuesday, April 30, with Barbara Shapiro (The Art Forger), Followed by Dennis Lehane (Live by Night), May 14 and Other Speakers

Barbara Shapiro

Nothing will be as it was before April 15's disastrous events, although it may seem that way: The gardens in front of the library are in bloom as they were last year; so are the trees in Library Park. The Hubway bikes have been reinstalled at the corner of West Newton Street and the trash bins on the block still overflow from time to time, just as always.

FOSEL is preparing for next Tuesday's reading and is looking for a date to have Doug Bauer return, the author who was scheduled to read on April 16 from What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death. It is a title that could not have been more appropriate for the occasion. But we needed to pause.

We resume the The South End Writes series on Tuesday, April 30 with a reading by Barbara Shapiro from her suspense novel, The Art Forger. She will be followed on May 14 by Dennis Lehane (Live by Night) and Alice Hoffman (The Dovekeepers) on May 21.  Shapiro, a South End resident, based her book on the theft twenty-five years ago at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum when it (and the world) was robbed of thirteen works of art. They included four by Rembrandt:  Storm on the Sea of Galilee (1633), a Lady and Gentleman in Black (1633), a self portrait (1634), and an etching on paper; Vermeer’sThe Concert (1658–1660);  Govaert Flinck’s Landscape with an Obelisk (1638);  an ancient Chinese vase; five works on paper by Edgar Degas; a finial from the top of a pole support for a Napoleonic silk flag; and Manet’s painting, Chez Tortoni (1878–1880).

Shapiro is intimately familiar with these works, and virtually every other aspect of this unsolved art heist, as a result of the research she did to transform the givens of the case into the literary thriller that was published last year. She wrote five previous suspense novels, including The Safe Room, Blind Spot, See No Evil, Blameless and Shattered Echoes, and four screenplays, Blind Spot, The Lost Coven, Borderline and Shattered Echoes. She teaches Creative Writing at Northeastern University. The author will be introduced by local filmmaker Alice Stone, who is scheduled to talk about her work-in-progress, the documentary, Angelo Unwritten, on June 11.

Tuesday's event starts at 6:30 PM. Books will be available for borrowing and sale at the reading. Shapiro's five favorite books are listed under The South End Reads, with the selections of this season's previous authors.

Next readings:

Tuesday, May 14, 6:30 p.m.

Dennis Lehane,

the spectacularly successful author who grew up in Dorchester and is ALSO a BPL trustee, published his latest novel, Live by Night, in 2012. Set in Boston in the 1920s, the New York Times’ reviewer called the book a “sentence-by-sentence pleasure.” Previous novels include, among others, Gone Baby Gone,Shutter Islandand Mystic River, all made into fabulous movies.

Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Hoffman

The Dovekeepers, a historical novel describing the AD70 massacre at Masada from the point of view of four women at the fortress before it fell during the Jewish-Roman war, is the most recent of the nearly two dozen novels by Hoffman and just came out in paperback. To be introduced by Sue Miller.

Tuesday, June 11, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Stone,

the local filmmaker whose mesmerizing documentary, Angelo Unwritten, has followed the life of a teenager adopted out of foster care when he was twelve, will return with an update of new material gathered since December 2011.

Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m.

Philip Gambone

will return to read from his current work-in-progress, retracing the steps of his father who, as a soldier, was sent to Europe during the Second World War.

Tonight's Reading at the South End Library by Doug Bauer ("What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death") Has Been Cancelled Due to the Boston Marathon Bombings

Doug Bauer poster

Due to the bombings at yesterday's Boston Marathon, FOSEL's board and author Doug Bauer have cancelled tonight's scheduled reading from What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death.The board members extend their condolences to the loved ones of the victims and their empathy and sympathy to the many injured survivors, their families and their friends.

We treasure the vitality of this city, as do all our supporters. We will do all we can to restore and repair it with the passion we have for safe public spaces, civic life, books and films that help us understand the lives we live, art that makes us see the world better, and music to console and revive us. We thank the South End library staff in helping us accomplish these goals.

The next scheduled authors in The South End Writes series are:

Tuesday, April 30, 6:30 p.m.

Barbara Shapiro

wrote The Art Forger  as a fictionalized suspense thriller based on the heartbreaking heist of 13 irreplacable paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The author of five other suspense novels, and the non-fiction The Big Squeeze, the South End resident  teaches creative writing at Northeastern University.

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Tuesday, May 14, 6:30 p.m.

Dennis Lehane,

the spectacularly successful author who grew up in Dorchester and is ALSO a BPL trustee, published his latest novel, Live by Night, in 2012. Set in Boston in the 1920s, the New York Times’ reviewer called the book a “sentence-by-sentence pleasure.” Previous novels include, among others, Gone Baby Gone,Shutter Islandand Mystic River, all made into fabulous movies.

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Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Hoffman

The Dovekeepers, a historical novel describing the AD70 massacre at Masada from the point of view of four women at the fortress before it fell during the Jewish-Roman war, is the most recent of the nearly two dozen novels by Hoffman and just came out in paperback. To be introduced by Sue Miller.

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Tuesday, June 11, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Stone,

the local filmmaker whose mesmerizing documentary, Angelo Unwritten, has followed the life of a teenager adopted out of foster care when he was twelve, will return with an update of new material gathered since December 2011.

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Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m.

Philip Gambone

will return to read from his current work-in-progress, retracing the steps of his father who, as a soldier, was sent to Europe during the Second World War.

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South End Author Mari Passananti Returns to the South End Library to Read from her New Suspense Thriller, "The K Street Affair," Tuesday, March 19, 6:30 PM

]Mari Passananti poster

Mari Passananti once took her father's advice and went to law school instead of journalism school. She practiced law for a while, became a legal headhunter, but finally quit to write. Her first novel, The Hazards of Hunting While Heartbroken, was published in 2011; her second, The K Street Affair, just came out this year. Her background as an attorney and legal headhunter came in handy for this suspense thriller, since it plays out in our nation's capital and involves the FBI, Saudi and Russian oil interests and a roster of high-profile legal clients. She will read from her latest on Tuesday, March 19, at 6:30 PM at the South End branch.

Passananti is currently working on her third novel. Her books will be for sale and for borrowing at the South End Library. The event is free.

The next scheduled authors in The South End Writes series are:

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Tuesday, April 16, 6:30 p.m.

Doug Bauer

Editor, writer of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction, and revered professor of Literature at Bennington College (to where he commutes from the South End), Bauer will read from his most recent collection of essays, What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death. It willbe published in the fall of 2013  by the University of Iowa Press. His previous work includes three novels --Dexterity, followed by The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, both New York Times Notable Books; and two non-fiction books, Prairie City, Iowa and The Stuff of Fiction. He has edited anthologies, such as Prime Times: Writers on their favorite television shows; and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. He has received grants in fiction and creative non-fiction from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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Tuesday, April 30, 6:30 p.m.

Barbara Shapiro

wrote The Art Forger  as a fictionalized suspense thriller based on the heartbreaking heist of 13 irreplacable paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The author of five other suspense novels, and the non-fiction The Big Squeeze, the South End resident  teaches creative writing at Northeastern University.

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Tuesday, May 14, 6:30 p.m.

Dennis Lehane,

the spectacularly successful author who grew up in Dorchester and is ALSO a BPL trustee, published his latest novel, Live by Night, in 2012. Set in Boston in the 1920s, the New York Times’ reviewer called the book a “sentence-by-sentence pleasure.” Previous novels include, among others, Gone Baby Gone,Shutter Islandand Mystic River, all made into fabulous movies.

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Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Hoffman

The Dovekeepers, a historical novel describing the AD70 massacre at Masada from the point of view of four women at the fortress before it fell during the Jewish-Roman war, is the most recent of the nearly two dozen novels by Hoffman and just came out in paperback. To be introduced by Sue Miller.

=====

Tuesday, June 11, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Stone,

the local filmmaker whose mesmerizing documentary, Angelo Unwritten, has followed the life of a teenager adopted out of foster care when he was twelve, will return with an update of new material gathered since December 2011.

=====

Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m.

Philip Gambone

will return to read from his current work-in-progress, retracing the steps of his father who, as a soldier, was sent to Europe during the Second World War.

=====

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Andre Dubus III, Author of "Townie," Describes the Bones of his Memoir as "I Know What Happened, But What the Hell Happened?"

Standing before a tightly packed audience upstairs at the South End Library, novelist Andre Dubus III  talked about the genesis of  Townie, and the pitfalls of writing memoirs in general.Townie was an "accidental memoir," he told the mesmerized listeners. He had written several novels (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days, Bluesman), but started on what became Townie as an exploration of why he never learned to play baseball the way his sons had. Watching their  coaches yell things at them like "Bobby, I want nothing but strikes outta you, you hear that, nothing but strikes,"  Dubus III always assumed he never got into baseball because it was "too competitive" and therefore just "didn't give a damn." Four years and five hundred pages later he had produced a heart-rending memoir detailing his family's life after his "charismatic father," one of America's best short-story writers, Andre Dubus, "dumped" his mother, a former  Louisiana beauty pagaent winner. She was 27, uneducated, with four young children and no income. She found a job and went back to school but her social-work career left the fridge bare and the rent often unpaid.

Andre Dubus III signing books

Author Doug Bauer, who introduced Dubus III, said Townie's "raw prose" told two tales: of growing up amid the economic despair of the mill towns of the Merrimack River valley with a mother "long on love and short on cash," and of Dubus III 's "generous acceptance" of his father as a man for whom writing was "essential." Dubus III, now reconciled and resolved about who his father was, told the audience he finds he has to defend him to reviewers and readers. A priest who had once been a stockbroker, asked him if his father, who wrote so "insightfully,"  had been "a fraud." "All I could say," Dubus III commented, "was that the writer was larger than the man. He was gifted, but AWOL as a father."  He worried that perhaps he had not "nailed" his father in his memoir but realized one of the pitfalls of memoir-writing is that it is your truth at a particular moment in time, not someone else's. "It is easy to confuse the writer with the man," he told the crowd. "But I couldn't idealize him. My father was a deeply flawed man who, as a writer, illuminated the truth."

Dubus III's new novel, "Dirty Love," will appear in October. The author has promised to return to the South End Library for a repeat performance. His five favorite books are listed under The South End Reads.

The next South End Writes reading will be on Tuesday, March 19, when South End writer Mari Passananti will talk about her latest suspense thriller, The K Street Affair.

Tuesday, March 19, 6:30 p.m.

Mari Passananti

will read from her second novel, The K Street Affair.

Tuesday, April 16, 6:30 p.m.

Doug Bauer

Editor, writer of numerous books of fiction and non-fiction, and revered professor of English at Bennington College (to where he commutes from the South End), Bauer will read from his most recent collection of essays, What Happens Next?: Matters of Life and Death, to be published in the fall of 2013  by the University of Iowa Press. His previous work includes several novels, including Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans; and two non-fiction books, Prairie City, Iowa and The Stuff of Fiction. He has edited anthologies, such as Prime Times: Writers on their favorite television shows; and Death by Pad Thai and Other Unforgettable Meals. 

Tuesday, April 30, 6:30 p.m.

Barbara Shapiro

wrote The Art Forger  as a fictionalized suspense thriller based on the heartbreaking heist of 13 irreplacable paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The author of five other suspense novels, and the non-fiction The Big Squeeze, the South End resident  teaches creative writing at Northeastern University.

Tuesday, May 14, 6:30 p.m.

Dennis Lehane,

the spectacularly successful author who grew up in Dorchester and is ALSO a BPL trustee, published his latest novel, Live by Night, in 2012. Set in Boston in the 1920s, the New York Times’ reviewer called the book a “sentence-by-sentence pleasure.” Previous novels include, among others, Gone Baby Gone,Shutter Islandand Mystic River, all made into fabulous movies.

Tuesday, May 21, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Hoffman

The Dovekeepers, a historical novel describing the AD70 massacre at Masada from the point of view of four women at the fortress before it fell during the Jewish-Roman war, is the most recent of the nearly two dozen novels by Hoffman and just came out in paperback. To be introduced by Sue Miller.

Tuesday, June 11, 6:30 p.m.

Alice Stone,

the local filmmaker whose mesmerizing documentary, Angelo Unwritten, has followed the life of a teenager adopted out of foster care when he was twelve, will return with an update of new material gathered since December 2011.

Tuesday, June 18, 6:30 p.m.

Philip Gambone

will return to read from his current work-in-progress, retracing the steps of his father who, as a soldier, was sent to Europe during the Second World War.

Local History and Dynamic Poetry Draw Big Crowds for Lynne Potts (A Block in Time) and Poet April Bernard (Miss Fuller, and New Poems)

It's a good thing that the South End Library offers elevator access to its second-floor community room: It allowed a harried-looking mother with three young children and a squeaky-wheeled stroller to come up and listen to a reading underway by poet April Bernard on a recent Tuesday night. "It made my day," the grateful mother said afterwards.

She was not alone. A large crowd had taken every seat in the room, spellbound first by Bernard's forceful reading from her 2012 fictionalized history of Boston-based feminist Margaret Fuller, followed by five new poems received with appreciative laughter and applause. A week earlier, a standing-room audience listened intently to Lynne Potts describe her 35 years living on Holyoke Street and the research she has done to tie the colorful fortunes of that single block to the larger tale of the South End's many cycles of rise and decline.

Poet April Bernard signing books

While "Miss Fuller" is fictionalized history, it is based on years of research and "coincides with facts as known," said Bernard, who teaches creative writing at Skidmore College. The story of how Henry Thoreau traveled to the shores of Long Island hoping to find a manuscript that might have survived the shipwreck in which Fuller drowned with her husband and young son in 1850, "planted a seed in my tooth" when she first heard of it, said Bernard. "What if he found something else?" That conceit is at the root of the novel's fiction, and allowed Bernard to weave a new and complex picture of Fuller's character and beliefs, set in tumultuous times when the changes she advocated caused great discomfort not just to close friends and others but also to herself. After a few audience questions, Bernard read five new poems, titled, When I was Thirteen I Saw Uncle Vanya; Werner Herzog in the Amazon; Tis Late; Lids; and Thunder-Mountain-Mesa-Valley-Ridge, all likely to be included in Bernard's next collection. Both Lynne Potts's and April Bernard's five favorite books can be found on this web site under the tab The South End Reads.

Local author Lynne Potts signing books

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On Tuesday, February 26, acclaimed author Andre Dubus III (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days) will read from his riveting memoir, Townie, in which he describes the violence, bullying and loneliness of his childhoodafter his father, short-story writer Andre Dubus, leaves the family. He will be introduced by his colleague, Doug Bauer. The reading starts at 6:30 PM.

Those who missed Lynne Potts's reading have another chance to hear her when she will read from her book on Thursday, February 21 at the South End Historical Society, 532 Massachusetts Ave, at 6:30 PM. Reservations are required: 617 536-4445 or by email at admin@southendhistoricalsociety.org.