An Author Event with Catherine Landis

517 Union Avenue,Knoxville TN 37902

28 August, 2022

Description

Catherine was born in Birmingham but grew up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, mostly on Signal Mountain. There she spent hours playing under the rhododendrons, wandering through the woods, and sitting on a rock overlooking the valley, where she wrote her first poems and dreamed of becoming a writer. In 1978 she graduated with a BA in English from Davidson College, where she was the first woman editor of the college newspaper. She went on to a career in journalism in New Bern, North Carolina, before moving to Lexington, Kentucky, where she worked in marketing and then production at Kentucky Educational Television. Her first novel, SOME DAYS THERE’S PIE was published in 2002. Her second, HARVEST, in 2004. TWO TRAINS LEAVE THE STATION: A Meditation on Aging, Alzheimer’s, and Arithmetic, and A PLAGUE OF GODS both were published in 2022. She has served on the board of local Planned Parenthood affiliates and as a volunteer for the Knox County Democratic Party. Her love of the outdoors has made her champion of environmental causes. Her love for books and writers and human beings has made her a champion of independent bookstores. She is the mother of two sons and the grandmother of two grandsons and is the lucky beneficiary of magnificent daughters-in-law. She lives with her husband in Knoxville, Tennessee. When her mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, Catherine set out to do something to protect her own brain. Hoping to avoid a similar fate, she went searching for brain exercises and landed on math. Considering herself innumerate, she was flustered by the mere word. Could she relearn it? Could this source of embarrassment become an opportunity? TWO TRAINS LEAVE THE STATION: A Meditation on Age, Alzheimer's, and Arithmetic, is the story of how Catherine relearned math while grappling with her mother's illness and her own inevitable aging. A PLAGUE OF GODS reimagines nine Greek and Roman myths and the Epic Of Gilgamesh as stories set in the early months of the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic. These stories are not retellings of the old myths, rather, each story contains an essence of the original, a seed embedded, to offer a mythic framework for this profoundly strange and anxious time. With one exception, they are told from the point of view of women who, in the original myths, were reduced to the roles of goddesses, monsters, or beautiful maidens. The themes are eternal: hope, struggle, isolation, confusion, longing, pride, misunderstanding, rage, and death. Everything is changed, and yet, nothing is. Please note: space is limited!