Virtual Author Series: Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann
Join us for an engaging conversation about Nebraska memoir with Sarah Fawn Montgomery and Suzanne Ohlmann, two writers with Nebraska roots who explore the world in order to learn more about their place in it. If you are interested in the same "human stories" Willa Cather illuminated in her own work, you will enjoy this free author series event!
Blending lyric memoir with lamenting cultural critique, Montgomery's book Halfway from Home examines contemporary longing and desire, sorrow and ache, searching for how to build a home when human connection is disappearing, and how to live meaningfully when our sense of self is uncertain in a fractured world. Taking readers from the tide pools and monarch groves of California, to the fossil beds and grass prairies of Nebraska, to the scrimshaw shops and tangled forests of Massachusetts, Montgomery holds a mirror up to America and asks us to reflect on our past before we run out of time to save our future. Halfway from Home grieves a vanishing world while offering—amidst emotional and environmental collapse—ways to discover hope, healing, and home.
—You can order Halfway from Home HERE from our online bookstore—
In Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life, Ohlmann launches the reader into flight over miles and decades of migration: from an apple-pie childhood in America's Fourth of July City to the dirt floors of a cowshed in rural India, we zigzag across time and geography to see the world through Ohlmann's eyes. Through incarnations as a musician, arts manager, and registered nurse, Ohlmann finally lands in Texas, buys a house, and gets a dog. But her house is haunted, and so is she. With honesty, compassion, and a sense of humor, Ohlmann recounts her tenacious search into the shadows of her life.
—You can order Shadow Migration HERE from our online bookstore—
Funding was provided by Humanities Nebraska and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
About Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and the poetry chapbooks Regenerate: Poems of Mad Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2017), Leaving Tracks: A Prairie Guide (Finishing Line Press, 2017), and The Astronaut Checks His Watch (Finishing Line Press, 2014). Her work has been listed as notable in Best American Essays many times, and her poetry and prose have appeared in Brevity, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Electric Literature, LitHub, New England Review, The Normal School, Passages North, Poetry Foundation, The Rumpus, Southeast Review, Terrain, and numerous other journals and anthologies. She holds an MFA in creative writing from California State University-Fresno and a PhD in English in creative writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts.
About Suzanne Ohlmann
Suzanne Ohlmann is a writer and registered nurse who lives in Nebraska and San Antonio, Texas. She and her husband, a firefighter, share their home with a community of dogs, cats, the occasional opossum, and their son. She works with rural heart failure patients who would otherwise not have access to advanced health care, and who love to remind her that they'd rather be frying frog legs or fixing fence line than listening to her advice.