Reading: Meghana Mysore with Mo Daviau

About this event

Annie Bloom's Books welcomes Meghana Mysore for a reading from her new story collection, Let All Our Ghosts Depart. Meghana will be in conversation with fellow West Virginia University press author––and our very own bookseller––Mo Daviau. About Let All Our Ghosts Depart: In Meghana Mysore's debut short story collection, present-day women and girls of the South Asian diaspora grapple with belonging and are haunted by intergenerational inheritances. Mysore, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants, spins her stories around narrators struggling to assimilate into the surreal world around them. In the world of these stories, ghosts are real––in "Repair Shop," dead mothers reappear as chiding, broken-down cars; in "Hoarder," the narrator's ex-lovers transform into scarves that won't let her go. In another story, a daughter, trapped inside her grief, spends her days Face Timing with her dead father, watching him become a young man she never knew. At turns absurd and darkly humorous, and sometimes speculative, Mysore's stories touch on real-life experiences of intergenerational trauma, womanhood, the fluidity of desire and longing, and coming home to one's body. Her characters have faced violences small and large, holding losses that bind them to their pasts and weigh them down in daily life. Each of these stories contains an experience of transformation, be it small or monumental for these women, who find spaces of freedom and delight within their circumstances. Meghana Mysore's stories, essays, and poems have appeared in The Yale Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Audacity, and more. She is the winner of the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Mysore has been a Steinbeck Fellow and a scholar at McCormack Writing Center and Bread Loaf. She holds an MFA from Hollins University and a BA in English from Yale. Mysore has taught as visiting faculty at Amherst College and Bucknell University, and is assistant professor of English and creative writing at Randolph College. From Portland, Oregon, Meghana is a daughter of Indian immigrants and a lover of non-sequiturs and used bookstores. Mo Daviau (pronounced DAH-vee-oh) is the author of the novels Every Anxious Wave and Epic and Lovely, as well as a bunch of essays and such. Born and raised in Fresno and San Diego County, California, Mo is a graduate of Smith College and the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. A former resident of Los Angeles, Austin, and Johnson, Vermont, Mo now lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, who is a sound designer and all-around excellent cook. Like Nina, the protagonist of Epic and Lovely, Mo is an age gap baby and was diagnosed with a non-fictional genetic disorder (Marfan syndrome) as a child. The two probably have something to do with each other. Mo's dad would be 115 if he were still alive (she's solidly Gen X). Mo is a bookseller and the event host at Annie Bloom’s Books, a beloved Portland institution.

Who

• Meghana Mysore with Mo DaviauAuthor

Venue

Annie Bloom's Books

7834 SW Capitol Hwy, Portland, OR

Venue website

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