April brings an evening of readings by local authors to the

 Women in Memoir Series

at Heartstone Books

 Thursday April 20th at 7 pm

 Each author will read from her work in memoir.  The evening will include time for discussion about the writing process and the appeal and challenges of memoir writing.  The reading will take place in the Front Porch Café adjacent to Heartstone Books in Putney.  Refreshments will be served.

 Elizabeth Lewis says of her work,  “Memoir for me is a way of finding the path my past takes to my future.  So it's really a present state of trying to keep up.  Through writing I examine my own ever-changing shifts in time and space.  I'm a collage artist, a collage writer, an all-and-around collage.  I currently seem pre-occupied with suns, moons, planets, lights and shadows, spells broken and cast, moments that don't last......and writing in rhyme.” 

 Barbara Dutton Dretzin has lived in N.H. for 17 years.  A graduate of no college, she opted for life experience, dropping out in the middle of her senior year at Marlboro to get married.  In addition to reporting and editorializing for a small newspaper, she amassed a large pile of rejection and we’d-like-to-see-more letters.  She now writes memoir in the venue of Memoir Cafe where “no rejection slips are ever issued and everyone gets not only published but read.”  She recently wrote a group of stories drawn from her two years with the Peace Corps in West Africa.  Tonight’s story from that group is “Jacob of the Very Bad Words.”

 Leslie Frothingham is Head of the Science Department at the Putney School.  For two years, she sailed with her family to Central America and back, writing all the way.  She will read excerpts from the chronicles of her exciting, humorous, and sometimes harrowing adventure.   

 MaryLiz Riddle has lived in Southern Vermont since 1961.  She began taking her writing seriously in the mid 1980's and she attended classes in the Creative Writing MFA program at the University of Montana.  She says her “writing style blurs the borders between prose and poetry and is informed by the landscapes of Vermont and Montana.”

 This evening marks the first of three in 2006 devoted to bringing unpublished women memoir writers into the spotlight.  The programs for August and November still have some openings.  Women interested in participating are invited to contact Stephanie Montgomery at stephanie@memoircafe.com or at 603.756.2522.
                      *               *               *

 The Women in Memoir Series continues on May 20th with Mary Childers, the author of Welfare Brat.  On June 13th Laura Waterman will read from Losing the Garden.  And on July 25th Lori Arviso Alvord will read from The Scalpel and the Silver Bear.

 This series includes a radio interview with each author aired during the week of the reading at Heartstone Books on WOOL, 100.1 FM in Bellows Falls.  The weekly Memoir Café radio show airs Mondays at 10am, Fridays at 5pm and Saturdays at 7:30am.