Marjorie Sandor to Read from New Memoir

Tonight we are excited to be hosting Corvallis author and professor Marjorie Sandor, reading from her recently published memoir The Late Interiors: A Life Under Construction, published by Arcade Publishing. The book tells the story of five seasons of change and renewal in a woman's life, braiding entries from a garden journal with lyric meditations and full-blown essays on our eternal -- and contradictory -- hunger for adventure and refuge.

At a time in her life when she once thought a person should have been well settled in for the long haul, she falls in love with a colleague, leaves her husband, and co-parents a daughter through adolescence. As they are building a home and a life together, her partner undergoes sudden emergency heart surgery, reminding them vividly of the frailty of life. Then they learn that a developer plans to build a multistory student apartment complex just behind their small, nascent, back garden, threatening their new-found haven.

Through it all, as a recent review in The New York Times notes, Sandor gardens, proffering "nimble meditations on healing, friendship, literature, architecture, and music." And her gardening mirrors her writing habits. "Over the centuries, around the world, we have always come home to one truth: Gardening sustains life, love and happiness."

Booklist says about her writing, "Whether she is writing essays...or fiction, Sandor's prose is as tangy and luscious as just-plucked fruit."

Sandor is the author of four books and the 2004 winner of the National Jewish Book Award in Fiction for Portrait of my Mother, Who Posed Nude in Wartime: Stories. Her earlier book of personal essays, The Night Gardener: A Search for Home, won the 2000 Oregon Book Award for Literary Nonfiction. Her work has appeared in magazines such as The Georgia Review and TriQuarterly and in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Twenty Under Thirty, The Best American Spiritual Writing, and other anthologies. She teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Oregon State University.

Tonight's reading starts at 7 pm -- we hope you can join us!