LAKEPORT >> The Lake County Library presents the NEA Big Read keynote event “Because Survival is Insufficient: a Community Discussion of Station Eleven and Why We Persist with this Crazy Thing Called Art” a free event on Sunday Oct. 22 at 2 p.m. The public is invited to join the discussion at the Mendocino College Lake Center located at 2565 Parallel Drive in Lakeport.
Emily St. John Mandel’s award-winning novel, Station Eleven, takes place in a world decimated by disease. A pandemic known as the Georgia Flu has wiped out much of the populations and what’s left of civilization struggles to persist among the rubble. It doesn’t sound like an uplifting tale. Somehow, though, it is. As Karen Valby states in Entertainment Weekly: “This is not a story of crisis and survival. It’s one of art and family and memory and community and the awful courage it takes to look upon the world with fresh and hopeful eyes.”
Join novelist, playwright and Mendocino College professor Jody Gehrman in a facilitated discussion about Station Eleven and what it means to our community. Add your thoughts as we explore this beautifully constructed love letter to art, theatre, and our persistent need to create.
Jody Gehrman has authored eleven published novels and numerous plays for stage and screen. Her debut suspense novel, Watch Me, is published by St. Martin’s Press. Her Young Adult novel, Babe in Boyland, won the International Reading Association’s Teen Choice Award and was optioned by the Disney Channel.
Gehrman’s plays have been produced or had staged readings in Ashland, New York, San Francisco, Chicago and L.A. Her newest full-length play, Tribal Life in America, won the Ebell Playwrights Prize and will receive a staged reading at the historic Ebell Theater in Los Angeles.
She and her partner David Wolf won the New Generation Playwrights Award for their one-act play, Jake Savage, Jungle P.I. She holds a Master’s Degree in Professional Writing from the University of Southern California and is a professor of Communications at Mendocino College in Northern California.
This event is presented in cooperation with the Lake County Friends of Mendocino College, an affiliate of the Mendocino College Foundation, Inc.
Visit the Big Read on the web at www.lakecountybigread.com. For more information call the Lake County Library at 263-8817.
NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest. The program broadens our understanding of our world, our communities, and ourselves through the joy of sharing a good book. Lake County Library is one of 77 nonprofit organizations across the country to receive a grant to host an NEA Big Read project
