{"id":36798,"date":"2018-02-06T14:55:54","date_gmt":"2018-02-06T19:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/?p=36798"},"modified":"2018-02-23T08:37:27","modified_gmt":"2018-02-23T13:37:27","slug":"february-writers-read-feature-emu-alumna-patricia-grace-king","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/emu.edu\/now\/news\/2018\/february-writers-read-feature-emu-alumna-patricia-grace-king\/","title":{"rendered":"February Writers Read to feature EMU alumna Patricia Grace King"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alumna Patricia Grace King is the featured author at a Feb. 22 Writers Read event at Eastern Mennonite University. The reading will be in Common Grounds coffeehouse in the University Commons at 6:30 p.m. <\/span><\/p>\n

King will read<\/span> from her recent novella <\/span>Day of All Saints<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Miami University Press, 2017), which won the press\u2019s \u00a0Novella Prize. In it, Mart\u00edn Silva de Choc, childhood survivor of an army massacre during the Guatemalan\u00a0<\/span>civil war, and now a language school teacher in Guatemala City, falls in love with his American student, Abby, and follows her home to Chicago. Days before their wedding, Abby goes missing, and on a Halloween afternoon Mart\u00edn embarks on a search that leads through the ghost-strewn yards of Chicago\u2014and ultimately back to his violent past.<\/span><\/p>\n

The novella<\/span> is \u201ca heartbreaking, sensual tale, steeped in the rich details and characters of Guatemala,\u201d wrote author Patricia Henley in a review, and author Christopher Castellani called it \u201celegantly-structured, suspenseful, and affecting.\u201d King, he wrote, has \u201csharp prose, vivid setting across two cultures, and a profound empathy for the dispossessed, the forgotten, and the dreamers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The impulse for the story, King said, happened while walking one fall with her husband in Chicago. They had just moved there from Guatemala, where she had heard the testimonies of civil war survivors now reflected in the protagonist\u2019s backstory. King said she was \u201cblown away\u201d by the extent of some Chicagoans\u2019 Halloween decorations, and she remembered Guatemalans she knew who saw the holiday as \u201ca devilish business.\u201d In those same Chicago yards, King said, \u201cI often saw Latino men working \u2013 and heard them speaking Spanish \u2013 and I\u2019d wonder how differently they perceived this American holiday.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

King hopes that the book will be one that \u201cexpands and enriches the world of the reader\u201d and \u201ccreates a bridge between the reader\u2019s experience and the experience of another human.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A 1989 graduate of EMU, King now returns to campus with a perspective that she would offer to her younger self, if she could: \u201cIt is possible to make a life out of art,\u201d she said. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEven though I knew from age five or six that I loved to write, it took me decades to find out for myself that, with perseverance and talent and training and luck, being a writer is something a person can actually <\/span>do<\/span><\/i>. Not just as a hobby. Not just as a loved activity squeezed in around the edges of so-called real life,\u201d she said. <\/span><\/p>\n

King said that as a student at EMU she \u201cimmediately felt at home.\u201d But she\u2019s a big fan of EMU\u2019s cross-cultural program, because international experiences and cross-cultural learning are \u201clife-changing.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThose international experiences I had as an EMU student are also one of the reasons I\u2019m drawn toward border-crossing or fish-out-of-water stories, a genre to which <\/span>Day of All Saints<\/span><\/i> definitely belongs,\u201d she said.<\/span><\/p>\n

King, a native of North Carolina and past resident of Atlanta, Chicago, Virginia\u2019s Shenandoah Valley, Spain and Guatemala, received a PhD in English from Emory University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College\u2019s Program for Writers. She taught in EMU\u2019s language and literature department from 2000 to 2003. She currently lives in Durham, England.<\/span><\/p>\n

Her previous works include two chapbooks, and she is finishing a novel and a story collection. Her stories have been published by <\/span>Ploughshares<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>The Gettysburg Review<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Narrative Magazine<\/span><\/i>, and <\/span>Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry<\/span><\/i>, and she was the 2013-2014 Carol Houck Smith Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alumna Patricia Grace King is the featured author at a Feb. 22 Writers Read event at Eastern Mennonite University. 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