If you’re looking for an engaging read to officially kick
off your summer reading list, consider getting a head-start on the work chosen for
the 2016 edition of the “If All of Rocheser Read the
Same Book…” city-wide book club. Writers & Books has chosen “Queen of the Fall: A Memoir of Girls
& Goddesses,” by Sonja Livingston.
This slim and poetic work considers the female life through
anecdotes of women who Livingston has known personally, through her observations of cultural and mythic
icons, and through her own memories of fumbling toward womanhood from an impoverished
and often confusing childhood.
We’re immersed in Livingston’s memory-mapping of the
landscape and limitations of her youth through vignettes that float the reader from richly-described
reveries of bliss derived from nature to meditations on the bewildering gift
and curse of fertility.
No stranger to plumbing the depths for memoir, Livingston’s
first book, “Ghostbread,” a work in the same tricky vein,
won an AWP Book Prize for Nonfiction and has been adopted for use by classrooms
around the nation.
“This is what the mind can do,” she writes in “Queen of the
Fall,” “if you allow it to rise from its thick beams and dirt-packed basements,
if you invite it to wander without tether, unnailed
by the hammer of logic.”
Her spyglass sweeps around restlessly, settling momentarily
on recalled fragments from before she gained an awareness of the world’s uglier
sides — though each innocent scene is overlaid with filters forged in experience.
Both of Livingston’s voices are honest and earnest and so highly relatable.
At the culmination of this season’s program, Livingston — who
is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis, and
splits her time between Tennessee and New York State — will visit Rochester for
readings, book signings, and appearances at local libraries, colleges, and
senior centers from March 15 to March 19, 2016.
Copies of the book are available for purchase now at the
Writers & Books bookstore. For more information on the “If All of Rochester
Reads the Same Book…” program, contact the program coordinator, Karen VanMeenen, at karen@wab.org. For more information on the
author, visit sonjalivingston.com.
This article appears in Jun 10-16, 2015.
