Join novelist Garth Greenwell and frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a reading and discussion of Greenwell’s new book of fiction, Small Rain. This event took place on Thursday, September 5, 2024.
In “The Triumph of a Heart,” a profile of the author in the September/October 2024 issue, Gresko explores the origins of Greenwell’s new novel, Small Rain, in which “an unnamed narrator enters the hospital during the height of the pandemic for a torn aorta, a painful and potentially fatal condition not often experienced in middle age. To treat the problem requires knowing what caused it, and that mystery catalyzes the narrative,” Gresko writes. “In some sense, writing Small Rain was my trying to deal with mortality,” Greenwell says. “At the heart of this book is the question, ‘Okay, if this is it, then what has my life meant? How does one measure the value of a life, and how would I measure the value of mine?’”
In this virtual event, Greenwell reads from the new book and discusses with Gresko its resonant themes of mortality and meaning-making, asking deep questions about what it takes to live a full life oriented toward art, open to the bewildering beauty of our own humanity.
Garth Greenwell is the author of What Belongs to You, which won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was a finalist for six other awards, including the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, it was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries, and is being translated into a dozen languages. His second book of fiction, Cleanness, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the L.D. and LaVerne Harrell Clark Fiction Prize, and France’s Prix Sade (Deuxième sélection). Cleanness was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a New York Times Critics Top 10 book of the year, and a Best Book of the year by the New Yorker, TIME, NPR, the BBC, and over thirty other publications. It is being translated into eight languages. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, A Public Space, and VICE, and he has written criticism for the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. He lives in Iowa City.
Brian Gresko is a writer, illustrator, and educator based in Brooklyn. Their work has appeared on Slate, Longreads, the Atlantic, the Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and in Poets & Writers Magazine, among numerous other publications. In 2014, Gresko edited the anthology When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Experience of Fatherhood (Penguin). They co-run the esteemed Pete's Reading Series in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. For over ten years, Brian has led workshops and classes at organizations including Catapult, Sackett Street Writing Workshops, The Center for Fiction, Jericho Writers, and the New York Public Library. They are a founding member of Writing Co-Lab, an artist-owned teaching cooperative. Brian received an MFA in Creative Writing from The New School, and graduated from Oberlin College as a first-generation college student with a self-designed, cross-disciplinary major entitled "Narrativity in Film."
