Mothers, Inheritance & the Things We Carry: Mari Matthias and Summer Stewart at Rose City Book Pub

Join Pacific Northwest authors Mari Matthias and Summer Stewart for an afternoon reading and conversation at Rose City Book Pub on August 15 from 4:00–5:30 p.m.

In Cleah's Bequest, Mari Matthias introduces readers to Cleah Lucky, a woman who proves that death is no reason to stop managing her children's lives. When Cleah's three estranged children gather for the reading of her will, they discover a legally airtight trust and a spectacularly unreasonable list of demands: holiday gatherings, approved menus, required outfits, designated games, a theme song, and even a rotating custody schedule for her urn. Sharp, funny, and deeply heartfelt, Cleah's Bequest asks what we owe the people who raised us and what it costs to get what we think we deserve.

Summer Stewart's MOTHER! takes a different route into the complicated terrain of family, identity, and inheritance. This genre-defying collection of poetry and essays interrogates what it means to be made, and remade, as a woman. Moving through girlhood, the body, labor, relationships, pregnancy, loss, and motherhood, Stewart blends intimate narrative with cultural analysis to expose the expectations and invisible systems women are so often asked to carry.

Together, Matthias and Stewart will read from their work and talk about mothers, daughters, family mythology, bodily and emotional inheritance, and the strange, funny, painful ways we become ourselves in relationship to the people who made us.

August 15 | 4:00–5:30 p.m.
Rose City Book Pub
Reading and conversation with Mari Matthias and Summer Stewart

Books will be available for purchase.