Undoubtedly, one of the greatest joys of reading is in its ability to take us somewhere as yet unknown to us. Join award winning authors John Rybicki and Polly Buckingham for an afternoon of prose and poetry that isn’t afraid to ask the big questions.
The stories in Polly Buckingham’s collection "The Expense of a View" provide the kind of painful enlightenment that I would prefer to know more from fiction and less from personal experience. Her writing resonates with a dark simplicity reinforced by a sense that what happiness and love can be found must be treasured and hoarded as a precious commodity. These melancholy stories provide me with reassurance that I am not alone in wanting to examine wounds whether perpetrated by a senseless deity, wreaked by a blind source of justice or self-inflicted in an effort to resolve inner conflict.
A mother tires to coax her son into another CAT scan during a brief remission from his cancer. After passing around a serving of guilt a couple abandons Thanksgiving dinner and is drenched by the Seattle rain. A father in Florida waits up late for fish to swarm while trying to accept the fact his prodigal son will not return. The Oregon Coast is the setting for a story bemoaning lost love and another where a lonely woman is drawn to a drug addict between binges. A young boy, neglected by his father, goes on a walkabout with his dog through the scablands of Eastern Washington.
These are stories with a sense of place where people live somewhere long enough so that a portion of that landscape is written into their lives, branding them with a sorrow that cannot be erased. Anton Chekov wrote “At the door of every happy person there should be a man with a hammer whose knock would serve as a constant reminder of the existence of unfortunate people.” Polly Buckingham is such a person on the other side of the wall and "The Expense of a View" is her hammer.
Rybicki’s newest collection of poetry, When All the World Is Old, is a heart-wrenching confrontation with grief.
Venue: Conference Theater, main floor, Spokane Convention Center
