FEATHER ROUSING: An Afternoon of Reading and Music with Rebecca Meacham and the Griffon String Quartet

Join us for an afternoon of reading and music celebrating the publication of former Write On resident Rebecca Meacham’s latest collection, Feather Rousing. The title piece of the collection was the result of a 2018 Poetry Meets Music with Midsummer’s Music. Rebecca created the piece in response to music by Charles-Valentin Allkan. We are delighted to have the Midsummer’s Griffon String Quartet join us to interlace music and writing at this celebration. The event is free and open to the public. A light reception will follow.

About the Author:

Rebecca Meacham’s short story collection, Let’s Do, won UNT Press’s Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her flash fiction collection, Morbid Curiosities, won the New Delta Review chapbook prize. Her work has appeared most recently in Best Microfiction 2021, Wigleaf, Had, and Gigantic Sequins, and her prose has been set to music, translated into Polish, and carved into woodblocks and letter-pressed by steamroller. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she directs The Teaching Press and chairs the BFA in Writing and Applied Arts program. Her chapbook, Feather Rousing, is published this spring by Black Lawrence Press.

About the Book:

In this “hybridiary” of historical fiction and personal memoir, we peer inside baby incubators at Coney Island, waiting for childhood to take wing. We overhear the dying dreams of the Imperial Romanov family, and we fret the simple act of watching a child walk to class. Hope is a bright and constant thread: a tornado cuts a tender swath; a lady bides time inside a tiger’s claws; teenagers preen on screens during pandemic lockdown. Rescues are fumbled but perpetually launched—and love is a gift the way the sun is a gift: constant and consoling, but also blinding, near-obliterating. Tragic, funny, and surreal, FEATHER ROUSING nests in the spaces between caretaking and grief, secret and spectacle, recollection and imagination, global anguish and private joy.

“This ineffable collection reads like sadness, like music, like poetry, like instinct, like mothers and children and the heart beating right out of your chest. I adored it!” —Amber Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You

About the Griffon String Quartet:

The Griffon String Quartet is a full-time professional string quartet from September through May and resides in northeastern Wisconsin. Actively embedded in the community, the Quartet works with all ages to enhance lives through the power and beauty of music.