Women on the Edge [] Prose Café 

San Miguel Prose Café Presents

Women on the Edge

Featuring Merilyn Simonds and Wayne Grady

Live via Zoom

Thursday, November 4, 5:00 – 6:00 PM CST

Register HERE

Prose Café’s November 4th event, “Women on the Edge,” brings together the remarkable and prolific authors Merilyn Simonds and Wayne Grady, who each explore how crisis can push a person to the margins and then further still into an unexpected life. The authors will read from their new books and take questions from our audience. Two lucky audience members will also be the lucky winners of one of their books.

In Wayne Grady’s novel The Good Father, released last spring, Daphne Bowes has been to the edge and peered into the abyss. Dropped out of university, estranged from her father, disillusioned with the life she’d fallen into, it seemed every way she turned was blocked. It was a miracle she survived. But she did survive, and now, finds herself on a magical island, where she has a chance at a better life. The only question is—is it real? Or, as on Prospero’s island, is her chance at happiness built on another illusion?

Grady is the author of sixteen books of nonfiction and three novels. His nonfiction work has taken him to the far corners of the globe: from China with a group of Canadian paleontologists; to the North Pole with sea-faring oceanographers; and to Patagonia to look for the largest fossil dinosaurs known to science.

In Merilyn Simond’s new book, Woman, Watching, due out in May 2022, she tells the true story of her northern neighbor, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence. Kirline was a Swedish aristocrat who survived the Russian Revolution and moved Canada as a Red Cross nurse, where she travelled by dogsled to her patients. In 1934, when Elzire Dionne gave birth to five babies, Louise became nurse to the famous Dionne Quintuplets. Repulsed by the media circus around the babies, Louise built a log cabin in the wilderness and devoted herself to studying the birds in her forest.  She became an internationally renowned author and naturalist, one of the first to track the midcentury decline of songbirds.

Simonds is author of more than 19 books. Born in Winnipeg, Canada, Merilyn grew up in Brazil, where she acquired a taste for the fabulous. She published her first book at the age of 29. Since then, her work has been anthologized and published internationally in eight countries. She publishes in a wide variety of genres—personal essay, memoir, travel, and literary fiction.

Advance registration is required (www.sanmiguelliterarysala.org). Tickets are free but if you make a donation (highly recommended) when signing up, you will be supporting both the San Miguel Literary Sala and San Miguel Prose Café, an all-volunteer organization which presents local and visiting writers, both established and emerging.