Annie Bloom’s welcomes author Maggie Kast, whose new book is Side by Side But Never Face to Face. Maggie will be in conversation with Rachel Swearingen, author of the forthcoming collection How to Walk on Water and Other Stories.
Register for this reading here: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/livestream-maggie-kast
Maggie Kast‘s Side by Side but Never Face to Face asks, Can new love be found in old age? Greta has been wrenched from a long and tightly-circled marriage to Manfred, an Austrian Holocaust survivor. Together they mourned the accidental death of a daughter and experienced a widening of spiritual horizons as they grieved. Shifting between Chicago, Austria, and rural Wisconsin, the present and decades past, these linked narratives unfold the story of Greta—daughter, wife, mother, widow, survivor, and seeker—with profound insight into the emotional conflicts, spiritual yearnings, and everyday experiences that connect us all.
Rachel Swearingen‘s debut, How to Walk on Water and Other Stories, presents stories that bristle with menace and charm with intimate revelations. An investment banker falls for a self-made artist who turns the rooms of her apartment into eerie art installations. An au pair imagines her mundane life as film noir, endangering the infant in her care. A down-on-his-luck son moves in with his elderly mother and tries to piece together the brutal attack she survived when he was a baby. Through nimble prose and considerable powers of observation, Swearingen takes us from Chicago, Minneapolis, and Northern Michigan, to Seattle, Venice, and elsewhere. She explores not only what it means to survive in a world marked by violence and uncertainty, but also how to celebrate what is most alive.
Maggie Kast is the author of The Crack Between the Worlds: A Dancer’s Memoir of Loss, Faith and Family and a novel, A Free Unsullied Land. She received an MFA in writing from Vermont College and has published fiction in The Sun, Nimrod, Rosebud, Paper Street, and other places. A chapter of her memoir, published in ACM/Another Chicago Magazine, won a Literary Award from the Illinois Arts Council. Kast’s essays have appeared in America, Image, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is a board member of Links Hall, incubator and presenter of dance and performance art in Chicago.
Rachel Swearingen‘s stories and essays have appeared in many prestigious literary journals, and she is the winner of multiple prizes and awards. She holds a BA from the University of Wisconsin – Madison and a PhD from Western Michigan University, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago.
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