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Author Event: Melody S. Gee
Join us as we welcome essayist and poet Melody S. Gee as she reads from and discusses her newest book We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion.
Gee will sign copies after the presentation and they will be available to be mailed anywhere in the country. For signed or personalized copies, please order before noon on Oct 24th by phone or by using the links below.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Answering an unexpected call to faith in her thirties, Melody Gee contends with what saying "yes" to conversion requires of an adopted daughter of Chinese immigrants. Faced with a new framework for her place in the world, grief and doubt shadow her tentative steps toward becoming a believer. She looks for answers and consolation in her family's story of immigration trauma and cultural assimilation, in the ways their burdens and limitations made her answer-seeking both impossible and inevitable.
In essays that explore the parallels between conversion and language acquisition, isolated liturgies, cultural inheritances, stalled initiations, disrupted storytelling, and adoption, Gee examines conversion's grief and hope, losses and gains, hauntings and promises. We Carry Smoke and Paper is a memoir about what we owe to those who sacrifice everything for us, and it is about the many conversions in a lifetime that turn our heads via whispers and shouts, calling us to ourselves.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Melody S. Gee is the author of We Carry Smoke and Paper: Essays on the Grief and Hope of Conversion, as well as three books of poetry. Her essays have appeared in Commonweal Magazine, Blood Orange Review, and North Dakota Quarterly, and she is a regular contributor to Give Us This Day. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri with her husband and daughters.
Virginia Herbers is a retreat director, lecturer, and spiritual director who uses story and theology to shed contemporary light on traditional scriptural texts. Virginia has been an educator in the United States and Taiwan, a blogger for the USCCB, a regular columnist for Global Sisters Report, and a frequent presenter at retreat centers and parishes across the country. Her undergraduate degrees are in theology and mathematics, and she has an MA in pastoral studies from Aquinas Institute. She is the author of Gifts from Friends We Never Wanted, published by Liturgical Press. She currently serves as the director of mission formation at Saint Louis University.
Event Links
Website: https://go.evvnt.com/2656391-0
