Lit Youngstown's Food for Thought book discussion meets each month, Sept.-May, at 5:30pm on the 2nd Thursday at the Main Library, 305 Wick Ave., in the 2nd floor meeting room. Haven't read the book yet? No worries.
The October title is Death Prefers the Minor Keys by Sean Thomas Dougherty. This book is available at the Public Library of Youngstown & Mahoning County, and POP! Arts, Book, Culture via Bookshop.
In his twentieth book, most of which was first composed on the backs of medical forms while on break as a third-shift medical technician, Sean Thomas Dougherty brings us a memoir-like prose sequence reflecting on disability, chronic illness, addiction, survival, love, and parenthood.
In Death Prefers the Minor Keys, Dougherty offers the reader collaged prose poems, stories and essays full of dreams, metaphors, aphorisms, parables and narratives of his work as a caregiver. Moving portraits of Dougherty's residents, a series of letters to Death, invocations of Jewish ancestry through the photography of Roman Vishniac, imaginary treatments for brain injuries, and half translated short stories of lives both real and imagined populate this collection. Through these, Dougherty engages issues of labor, the ontology of disability, and the mysticism of life.
Death Prefers the Minor Keys is most of all a kind of love letter to Dougherty's wife, and her courage and complicity in the face of long-term illness and addiction. Ultimately, we see how the antidote to despair can reside in daily acts of caring for other human beings.
Upcoming titles:
November (novel) Trash Lands by Alison Stine
December (creative nonfiction) If This Were Fiction by Jill Christman
January (novel) Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
February (memoir) Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
March (travel writing) Bad Lands by Jonathan Raban
April (poetry) West: a Translation by Paisley Rekdal
May (travel writing) Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide by Tony Horowitz
Comments