Anne Gorrick and Deborah Woodard at Concordia Coffee House

Today’s Featured Book Event:

Spare Room presents Anne Gorrick and Deborah Woodard (Concordia Coffee House, @7:30pm): Anne Gorrick’s first book, Kyotologic, was published in 2008 by Shearsman Books (www.shearsman.com).  Collaborating with artist Cynthia Winika, she produced a limited edition artist’s book, “Swans, the ice,” she said, with grants through the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.  She also curates the reading series Cadmium Text, which focuses on innovative writing in and around the Hudson Valley (www.cadmiumtextseries.blogspot.com).

Deborah Woodard has published three chapbooks of poetry, The Orphan Conducts the Dovehouse Orchestra (Bear Star Press, 1999), The Book of Riddles (Boxcar Press, 1998) and Hunter Mnemonics (hemel press). Her first full-length collection, Plato’s Bad Horse, was published in 2006, also by Bear Star Press. The Dragonfly, her translation of the poetry of Amelia Rosselli (in collaboration with Giuseppe Leporace) was just published by Chelsea Editions.  She teaches at the Richard Hugo House, a community literary center in Seattle.

Other Book Event’s Today:

Robert Dean Lurie Reading (Reading Frenzy, @5:30pm): For almost thirty years, Australian band the Church have crafted music that blends a rich variety of styles — pop, psychedelic, progressive, and straight-ahead rock — yet always remains distinctive, thanks to the inimitable vocals and lyrics of front man Steve Kilbey.

Based on extensive interviews and featuring 71 photographs, No Certainty Attached is the first biography of Kilbey and his band. It charts their personal and musical ups and downs: the commercial heights of “The Unguarded Moment” and “Under the Milky Way,” the creative breakthroughs of the Priest=Aura album and Kilbey’s solo work, followed by the Church’s struggle to survive in the wake of bad business decisions and Kilbey’s drug indulgences, and their reemergence as an underground band with a worldwide cult following.

Author Robert Dean Lurie was given unprecedented access to Kilbey, so in one sense No Certainty Attached is an authorized biography — but it’s definitely a warts-and-all portrait. It pulls no punches, for example about its subject’s years of drug addiction. At the outset, Kilbey told the author: “Lurie, it’s your book. Write whatever the fuck you want about drugs. You have my blessing.”

Lurie also interviewed Kilbey’s family, present and former bandmates, friends and foes, and what emerges is the compelling story of an artist and a band clinging steadfastly to their muse in the face of external and internal difficulties — and the transformative power of the music they’ve created.

Gillian Flynn Reading (Powells City of Books, @7:30pm): Hailed by Stephen King as “a sharp, acerbic, and compelling storyteller with a knack for the macabre,” Flynn follows up her bestselling debut Sharp Objects with Dark Places (Crown), a haunting and intense thriller that asks if the truth can really set you free.

Please check your community Libraries schedule using these links: Washington County, Multnomah County, Clackamas County.