Produced In partnership with the
San Francisco Writers Conference.
This event will take place via Zoom. Please register (click the orange button on the right) and you will be sent the Zoom link one day before the event.
Meet Siurong Ker, the founder of Tailwinds Press—an independent press based in the New York area—and two 2020 Tailwinds authors with deep ties to San Francisco and its literary community, Shaenrayce Leigland (May We One Day Pick All the Shrapnel From Our Hearts) and Maria Espinosa (Suburban Souls). Siurong will speak about her experiences and vision as a publisher of literary fiction in a post-COVID environment, while Shaenrayce and Maria will discuss their new novels and the importance of place and memory in their writing.
May We One Day Pick All the Shrapnel From Our Hearts by Shaenrayce Leigland
In this enigmatic debut novel, a middle-aged man named Bridger returns from an anonymous city to his hometown of Missoula to drive a sewage truck and contemplate the distant and fractured relationships in his life. No longer able to communicate with his nameless art curator wife, he is having an affair with a younger, seriously ill coworker while caring for his deaf eight-year-old daughter. With spare, measured prose and a poetic ear for the serene rhythms of everyday life, Shaenrayce Leigland's unflinching portrait of dark stoicism is also an elegiac meditation on tenderness and grace. Buy on Amazon, Powell's, or Barnes & Noble.
Shaenrayce Leigland was born in Western Montana and attended the University of Montana. He currently resides in Alameda, California.
Suburban Souls by Maria Espinosa
Against the vibrant and liberated backdrop of 1970’s San Francisco, a husband and wife—both Jewish immigrants indelibly traumatized by their childhoods in Nazi Germany—face the turbulence of an increasingly sterile marriage. Saul, an emotionally withdrawn scientist, escapes into New Age mysticism with Shivaya, a self-styled clairvoyant Danish healer. Gerda drifts in and out of psychiatric care as her loosening grip on reality leaves its mark on their teenage daughter, Hannah. In this unflinching portrait of a woman's downward spiral into the nightmare of modern domesticity, Maria Espinosa weaves a deceptively simple tale about the terror of abandonment and the mysterious nature of suffering. Buy on Amazon, Powell's, or Barnes & Noble.
Maria Espinosa is the author of five novels, including Longing, which won the 1996 American Book Award; two collections of poetry, one of which was praised by Anaïs Nin as being “very sincere and direct and rich in feeling”; and a translation of George Sand’s Lélia. The 2010 winner of the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, she has taught creative writing and contemporary literature at New College of California and English as a Second Language at City College of San Francisco. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and has one daughter. Her website is www.mariaespinosa.com.