August 15, 2014, Friday - Janet Burroway Reading at The Loft
Time: 7:00pm
Location: The Loft at Open Book (Performance Hall), 1011 Washington Ave S
Janet Burroway Reading
Losing Tim is a memoir by a mother about a soldier son who killed himself. It’s not an easy read. But it’s a beautiful one. Burroway, a National Book Award nominee, welcomes readers to grieve along with her, while also providing a lens into how soldiers, and military contractors, like her son, are changed by their combat experiences. Jonathan Shay, author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, a highly acclaimed volume on PTSD, and a 2007 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, comments in the foreword, ”To me, the pain recalls Homer’s Iliad, in which, as James Tatum puts it in The Mourner’s Song, ‘the beauty [of the poetry] is in the killing.”’
Janet Burroway is the author of eight novels, plays, poetry, essays, texts for dance, and children’s books. She was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977 for her novel Raw Silk. Her Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft is the most widely used creative writing text in America, and her multigenre Imaginative Writing is out in a third edition. Her most recent novel is Bridge of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), and her play Medea with Child was produced in 2010 by Sideshow Theatre Company in Chicago. She is at work on a musical adaptation of Barry Unsworth’s novel Morality Play with composer Matthew M. Kiedrowski. She is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor Emerita at Florida State University. Her most recent book is Losing Tim, a memoir about her son, a private contractor in the Iraq War.