Memoir: The Meaning of Home
Sunday, May 7 | 11:30 AM - 12:30 PMBrower Center - Tamalpais Room
- Environment/Nature
- Memoir
When poet and essayist Camille Dungy moved from the Bay Area to Colorado a decade ago, her new garden became both a metaphor and a site of resistance. In Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, Dungy reflects on homogeneity and resilience, and makes the case, as Ayana Johnson writes, “that home is where you know the plants.” Lawyer and essayist Vanessa A. Bee’s memoir Home Bound is full of her own creative definitions of the word. Subtitled “An Uprooted Daughter’s Reflections on Belonging,” Bee’s formally inventive memoir strives to define home, as Publishers Weekly puts it, “outside of the bounds of borders and beliefs.” And in poet Kathryn Savage’s Groundglass, home is twisted into a potential site of harm and horror when one lives on a site of environmental contamination. Throughout, these considerations of home blend the authors’ intimate perspectives with broader questions of racial and economic injustice, ecological harm, housing insecurity, and other systemic crises. Kristin Keane, author of the memoir An Encyclopedia of Bending Time, will lead this essential conversation.
Book signing information: Bookshop West Portal, at the venue