November 21, 2014, Friday - The Story of a Book: Mary Gardner at The Loft

Time: 7:00pm

Location: The Loft at Open Book (Performance Hall), 1011 Washington Ave S

Novelist and Loft teaching artist Mary Gardner reads from her ebook A Very Little Cancer. She will be interviewed by her collaborators John Millar and Nancy Pickering on the story of how her book came to be.

Mary Gardner has been writing novels for almost 30 years, but she started teaching writing 50 years ago. (Combining the two is her great delight.) Her first novel, Keeping Warm, was published in 1987, followed by Milkweed, Boat People, winner of the Associated Writing Programs Award for the Novel in 1993, and Salvation Run. Starting in 2006, she worked with Richard “Deadeye” Hayes on his life story Outlaw Biker: My Life at Full Throttle, published in 2008.

John Millar has been a student at the Loft taking classes and weekend seminars on the novel, including classes from Mary Gardner. He is currently in the process of finishing his own novel, Bataan: To Walk With Giants, and hopes that once the revisions and edits are completed it will be published in 2015.

Nancy A. Pickering is a freelance graphic designer for print and web who also holds a computer programming certificate. Her niche is writing software documentation and user education materials for IT departments. She also is an associate at a firm in Chanhassen that makes smartphone apps for the financial industry. Nancy holds an MFA in Theater Design and was previously an Assistant Professor of Costume Design at universities in Texas and Florida.