Who: Kaethe Schwehn in conversation with June Melby
What: an evening celebrating her new novel, The Gospel of Salome
Where: Pulpit Rock Brewing
When: Wednesday, 11/12 at 7:00pm
Join Kaethe Schwehn (author of The Gospel of Salome) and local literary advocate, June Melby, for a conversation and Q&A session followed by a book signing on Wednesday, November 12th at 7pm at Pulpit Rock Brewing at 207 College Dr., Decorah. Everyone is invited to this free event sponsored by the Oneota Valley Literary Foundation, with support from Pulpit Rock Brewing and Dragonfly Books.
THE GOSPEL OF SALOME is a retelling of Biblical events set against the roiling backdrop of history’s first recorded pogrom, an examination of ideology and motherhood, and a poignant argument for love and equality in today’s world as well as its own context.
In 38 CE Alexandria, Salome, a skilled physician with a past she’s taken lengths to suppress, struggles to navigate the complex landscape of first-century womanhood and the rapid progression of dementia threatening both her memory and medical practice. John Mark, a new follower of the fledgling Christian movement, has been sent to preach the hope of Yeshua’s message in Alexandria’s synagogues. What he finds, however, is an oppressed and desperate people perhaps more in need of immediate help than eternal salvation: the Roman prefect Flaccus has labeled the Jewish population as alien, quarantining them away from the city’s daily life and consigning them to crushing poverty. As popular disdain for the Jewish people reaches a dangerous boiling point, John Mark turns to Salome for answers. Her story, which moves from the Greek countryside to the Roman Forum to the dusty hills of Nazareth, begins with a simple statement about Yeshua that threatens to change the characters and their world: “He was my son.”
Kaethe Schwehn was born in Chicago but she’s lived beside a lake in Minneapolis, on a sleepy street in Indiana, in a rural mountain village in Washington, across from a Mattress Mart in California, upon the side of a volcano in Ecuador, near the coupling of train cars in Montana, and between the dusty walls of a farmhouse in Iowa. Now she lives in Northfield, Minnesota where the re-enactment of a bank raid each year is softened with the scent of chocolate breakfast cereal cooking in the Malt O Meal factory down the road. Schwehn is the author of The Rending and the Nest, Tailings: A Memoir, and Tanka & Me and the co-editor of Claiming Our Callings: Toward a New Understanding of Vocation in the Liberal Arts. Her poems and prose can be found in journals such as Crazyhorse, Pleiades, jubilat, Witness, Minnesota Review and the anthology Fiction on a Stick. She’s been the recipient of a Minnesota Book Award for Creative Nonfiction, a Minnesota State Arts Board Grant, a Loft Mentor Series Award, and the Donald Justice Poetry Prize. Schwehn studied creative writing at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Montana and earned a BA from Gustavus Adolphus College. She currently teaches composition and creative writing at St. Olaf College.
Joining Kaethe in conversation is June Melby, a writer, comedian, poet, and performance artist. Her memoir My Family and Other Hazards (Holt 2014) was on the New York Times Bestseller list and won the Midwest Connections Award. It tells the story of the retro 1950s miniature golf course where June grew up, and her family lived and worked for thirty years. With a band or as a solo artist, she has performed all over the world, including the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Mission Creek, Iowa City; Bumbershoot, Seattle; as well as London, Munich, Hamburg, and Amsterdam. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Utne Reader, LAWeekly, and journals including Versal and Forklift Ohio among others. Winner of the children’s poetry slam at the Edinburgh Poetry Festival. As a comedian she appeared on Roe Rogan’s Full Frontal Comedy (Showtime). She is the green alien named “Bang” in Warner Brothers blockbuster “Space Jam,” starring Michael Jordan. June got her MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. Currently she lives in a log cabin in the woods with her husband and 60 acres of trees.
This event is part of Dragonfly Books and the Oneota Valley Literary Foundation’s robust author event series, which brings top-notch writers of all genres to Northeast Iowa to lead in conversations about literature and writing. To learn more about this event and other events with Dragonfly Books, visit www.dragonflybooks.com.
These events are part of the Oneota Valley Literary Foundation’s robust author event series, which brings top-notch writers of all genres to Northeast Iowa to lead in conversations about literature and writing. To learn more about these and other events with the Foundation or Dragonfly Books, visit www.dragonflybooks.com.
