Cara Stoddard reading and Q&A
A story of kinship, queerness, and the secrets of the body in the wake of illness and loss.
Spirography is a coming-of-age memoir about the bond between a father and daughter, their intertwined illnesses, and the enduring love that persists even after death. This memoir follows author Cara Stoddard's intersecting experiences of cancer, grief, and sexuality, rooted in the suburban Midwest of the late twentieth century—where idyllic lake life, water sports, NASCAR, Christian rock, and a willful ignorance around queerness define the landscape. Set in the author's childhood home on a lake in Michigan, this lyrical archive of a family navigating crisis is an elegy not only for the memory of her father but also the end of her childhood spent outdoors.
Stoddard takes the reader intimately through the checkpoints of her coming-of-age story—including working at a summer camp, moving to Colorado, falling in love, coming out—each leg of the journey backdropped by her father's declining health and the author's own incremental acceptance of this impending loss. Writing from ten years after her father's death, she traces her experiences of becoming a stepparent, carrying on her dad's legacy, and, in unimaginable ways, bringing him back to life.
Please join us for the book launch & reading for Spirography, and conversation between the author and Matthew Sullivan.
Bio
Cara Stoddard is a creative nonfiction writer and poet who grew up on a lake in Michigan. Their poems and essays have appeared in Fourth Genre, The Gettysburg Review, Terrain.org, and Ninth Letter. Currently, they live in Seattle with their stepdaughter.
Matthew Sullivan (he/him) is the author of the novel Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore, which was an IndieNext pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Pick, a GoodReads Choice Award finalist, and winner of the Colorado Book Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Spokesman-Review, Sou’wester and elsewhere, and his stories have been awarded the Florida Review Editor’s Prize and the Robert Olen Butler Fiction Prize. He grew up in a family of eight raucous kids in Aurora, Colorado, and received his B.A. from the University of San Francisco and his M.F.A. from the University of Idaho. After working as a bookseller at Tattered Cover Book Store in Denver and at Brookline Booksmith in Boston, he spent 20 years as a tenured instructor teaching writing, literature and film at a rural HSI community college in the high desert of central Washington State. He is married to a librarian, Libby, and now lives in Anacortes, WA, along the Salish Sea. His new stand-alone novel, Midnight in Soap Lake, is forthcoming from Harper Collins/Hanover Square Press.
The House bar will be open to serve alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.