Professor Mac Test of BSU, The Old Man and the Sea (on the Sea). Dr. Test discusses deeper currents in Hemingway’s love of fishing and the sea.
The Community Library Lecture Room
Rosa Rosales on Hemingway’s Home in Cuba
Presentation by Rosa Rosales, Director of the Finca Vigía, Hemingway’s home in Cuba from 1939-1959. Rosa will be joined by Interpreter Colin Laverty.
After Rosa’s presentation: Dinner for Festival guests and invited Library donors at Michel’s Christiania featuring the “Hemingway Hamburger,” Michel’s famous truffle fries, drinks, and dessert. Fee for this event is $50
Author Tom Spanbauer reads from “I Loved You More”
Tom Spanbauer’s first novel in seven years is a rich and expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak covering twenty-five years. At the heart of the book is a love triangle: two men, one woman, all of them writers. The first chapters are set in the mid–eighties in New York City. At Columbia, Ben forms a bond with his macho friend, Hank. Their bond is deep and ostensibly formed around their love of writing. But they soon find out their love is more than literary. As C.S Lewis says, friendship is homosexual. Hank is straight, though, on the Kinsey scale a zero, which means no men. Ben is a five, which means an occasional woman. But both are artists, and this affection between them is a force. How do you measure love?
The second part of the book, almost a decade later, takes place in Portland, Oregon. A now-ill Ben falls for Ruth, his writing student. Their affection, like Hank’s and Ben’s, begins with how the heart is laid bare on the written page. Affection grows into love, but it is not an equal love. Ruth provides the care and devotion Ben needs, but Ben’s just too broken, Ruth is one of his occasional women, and as Ben has found out with Hank, loving has its limits.
Ben and Ruth are in their uneasy second year when Hank visits Ben in Portland. On a whim, Ben introduces Hank to Ruth. And the real trouble starts.
Set against a world of writers and artists, New York’s Lower East Side in the wild eighties, the drab confining Idaho of Ben’s youth, Portland in his middle age, and the many places in between, the complex world disclosed in I Loved You More, written in the poisoned, lyrical voice of Ben, is the author’s most complex and wise novel to date.
Tom Spanbauer is the critically acclaimed author and founder of Dangerous Writing. His five published novels Faraway Places, The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon, In The City Of Shy Hunters, Now Is The Hour, and I Loved You More (Hawthorne Books, April 2014), are notable for their combination of a fresh and lyrical prose style with solid storytelling.
Gail Chumbley reads from “River of January”
River of January examines the dizzying development of the twentieth century through the lives of Virginia farm boy, Mont “Chum” Chumbley in his quest to fly, and Helen Thompson, a glittering New York dancer who aspired to fame.
Boulder Mountain Clayworks Present Artist Renee Brown
Artist/Sculptor Renee Brown will be conducting a clay workshop this weekend, July 19 and 20th in Ketchum at Boulder Mountain Clayworks. She is a very talented young clay artist with an MFA from the University of Texas at Denton and currently lives and works in Missoula, Montana. She has been named an “Emerging Artist” in 2014 by the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts. She will give a free lecture at the Ketchum Community Library on her work and her impression of current directions in clayart, Friday, July 18, at 5:00.
A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Renee Brown has lived and worked in Missoula for 6 years. In 2002 Renee left to pursue her MFA in Ceramics at the University of North Texas. Upon receiving her degree, she completed several artist residencies in Montana including: the Archie Bray Foundation, Red Lodge Clay Center and The Clay Studio of Missoula. She now maintains an independent studio in the Historic Brunswick Building in downtown Missoula, Montana. Brown’s sculptural works debuted at the Brink Gallery, Missoula, Montana in 2012 and she has since exhibited her work nationally.
Renee Brown’s ceramic sculptures are inspired by natural minerals and are an exploration of textures and forms that are not found in nature. “The blurred line between reality and created reality intrigue me,” Brown says. “Minerals are mined, processed and come into my studio as clay and glazes, and then are transformed in imaginative reincarnations of their original existence.”
Renee Brown’s work will be on display until August 1st at the Boulder Mountain Clay and Art Gallery across from the Knob Hill Inn.
Kyla Merwin reads from memoir, Lost & Found in Egypt: A Most Unlikely Journey Through the Shifting Sands of Love and Loss
Iconoclast Books and the Community Library are hosting Kyla Merwin, author of the newly released memoir, Lost & Found in Egypt: A Most Unlikely Journey Through the Shifting Sands of Love and Loss. The author will be on hand to read a short segment from her book, which debuted at #2 in Amazon’s Middle East-Travel section. She will also take questions, sign books and offer free papyrus bookmarkers from Egypt (while supplies last).
