Wednesday, August 19, 6:30-8pm, this on-line event requires advance registration

Each summer, the Thurber House lawn plays host to a series of outdoor literary picnics and readings with authors who have an Ohio connection. While this year’s picnics might look a little different, join us for this long-running tradition of good friends and great books!

A finalist for the 2019 Weatherford Award in Fiction, Weedeater is a contemporary story of love and loss told by a pair of eastern Kentucky mountaineers.

Gene is a lovelorn landscaper who bears witness to the misadventures of a family entangled in drugs, artmaking, and politics. Dawn is a young mother searching — for lost family members, lost youth, lost community, and lost heart. Picking up six years after the end of Robert Gipe’s acclaimed first novel, Trampoline, Weedeater is set in a community living through the last hurrah of the coal industry and the most turbulent and deadly phase of the battle with opioid abuse. The events Gipe chronicles are frantic. Weedeater is a story about how we put our lives back together when we lose things we thought we couldn’t bear losing, and how we find new purpose in what we thought were scraps and trash caught in the weeds.

Robert Gipe won the 2015 Weatherford Award for outstanding Appalachian novel for his first novel, Trampoline. Gipe grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee and resides in Harlan, Kentucky. From 1997 to 2018, he directed the Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College Appalachian Program in Harlan.

Picnicking begins at 6:30pm. We may be meeting on Zoom for this event, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t picnic! Grab a meal and drop in to the Zoom event early to picnic on the “lawn” with us. We’ll be rolling photos of the Thurber House lawn as you catch up with friends. The program begins at 6:45pm. You will have the opportunity to ask the author questions after the event and to purchase a book.

General admission: $10 per person.

Tickets: thurberhouse.org/literary-picnics

Hosted by Thurber House.

Date: 

Wednesday, August 19, 2020 - 6:30pm

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