Join us for a reception and conversation with Catamaran contributor and Santa Cruz local author Micah Perks, author of the newly released short story collection True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape which includes a story that originally appeared in Catamaran. Lit Chat is at the Catamaran Literary Reader studio #118, and is part of First Friday open studios at the Tannery Arts Center. Books will be available for purchase and author signing.
6:00 - 6:30 reception
6:30 - 7:00 reading and conversation with the author
7:00 - 7:30 book signings
Book description:
Magical and funny, profound and seductive, the linked stories in TRUE LOVE AND OTHER DREAMS OF MIRACULOUS ESCAPE explore the life-bending power of love. In these interwoven lives, ardent desire meets a keen sense of reality deep in the heart of progressive California. When Sadie opens a funky bookstore in Santa Cruz, she is swept off her feet by Daniel, a true-blue romantic—athletic, bookish, from Santiago, Chile. Their connection is heady and erotic, and it echoes through the love lives around them: from Harry Houdini’s first encounter with the widow Winchester to the threatening intimacy between a wife and her brother to a grumpy teenager who inspires her divorced parents. Years later, when Sadie and Daniel take an overdue trip to Paris, their blended family doesn't blend so well, sending them back to rediscover their roots. In these interconnected lives, the desire for passion is as strong as the desire to escape, and the terror of claustrophobic connection competes with the deepest human yearning. An intoxicating look at the complexity and simplicity of embracing and running from love.
About the author:
Micah Perks grew up in a log cabin on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness. She is the author of a novel, We Are Gathered Here, a memoir, Pagan Time, a long personal essay, Alone in the Woods: Cheryl Strayed, My Daughter and Me and her new novel, What Becomes Us. Her short stories and essays have won five Pushcart Prize nominations, and three of them are available separately on audible: Ghost Deer, There Once Was A Man Who Longed For A Child, and King of Chains. Excerpts of her new novel, What Becomes Us, won an NEA and The New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University. She lives in Santa Cruz with her family where she co-directs the creative writing program at University of California, Santa Cruz.