featuring

Apollo Grill, Eastworks Building, 116 Pleasant St, Easthampton, MA. 6:30–9 p.m. $20 for National Writers Union Members; $22 for Non-members. Price includes full dinner and speaker. Cash bar. Please RSVP by June 8 to wnorsvp@verizon.net or call 413-586-8844.

Jacqueline Sheehan is a fiction writer, essayist, and psychologist. Her critically acclaimed first novel Truth told the story of Sojourner Truth, abolitionist, feminist, and one of the most powerful American voices of the 19th century. The New York Times praised her “lively and vivid” writing, and The Daily Hampshire Gazette wrote, “The voice that contains this story has been sanded down to a coarse honesty.” Her new novel is Lost and Found, described by bestselling author Susan Elizabeth Phillips as “The best book I’ve read in a long time.”

Lost and Found is a heart-wrenching exploration of loss and grief. Psychologist Roxanne “Rocky” Pelligrino loses her husband suddenly and falls into a tailspin. Shattered to the core, Rocky finds that all of her psychological knowledge rings hollow. To escape her grief, she leaves behind the life she had shared with her late husband and seeks refuge on a secluded island off the Maine coast. Rocky gradually opens her heart to the people she meets there—Tess, a synesthete who attributes colors to numbers and smells to sounds; Melissa, a young woman whose rail-thin body is ravaged by disorder; and Hill, an archery instructor who reaches someplace deep within Rocky. Most important of all is Lloyd, a dog with a mysterious wound who becomes a guide to catharsis and healing.

A New Englander through and through, Jacqueline Sheehan nonetheless spent twenty years in Oregon, California, and New Mexico, where she wrote for newspapers, freelanced as a photographer, painted houses, and directed a traveling high school puppeteer troupe, among other things. Now a resident of the Pioneer Valley, she writes, teaches workshops, and maintains a private practice as a psychologist. In addition, she is the fiction editor of Patchwork Journal, the online journal of the internationally-based writing center Patchwork Farm. On June 12th, she will talk about Lost and Found and her life in writing. Please join us for this very special evening at the Apollo Grill. Great writing, great food, and great company—it’s Writers Night Out.

For more information about Jacqueline Sheehan and Lost and Found, go to http://www.jacquelinesheehan.com/index.html

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