Virtual launch party in celebration of Stacy Brewster’s new book, What We Pick Up.
Join What We Pick Up author Stacy Brewster for a virtual reading and conversation with the poet and editor Sara Guest, followed by a Q&A from the audience.
“Many of the small, precise moments of these stories remind me of an updated version of Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories--so real and perfectly calibrated you can reach them only through the beats of your heart.” —Sara Guest
A collection full of grace and humanity that resonates with tectonic force. You’ll want to read it again and again, even if it breaks your heart to do so.” -Robert Hill, author of The Remnants
““Extraordinarily cinematic, the stories in What We Pick Up light up the most vulnerable and compelling moments within families. Stacy Brewster is both poet and film director here. He tightly spins plots that go unexpected places while exploring the way language fails us.” ”
Register for the event below!
What We Pick Up is the gripping debut story collection from Portland author and screenwriter Stacy Brewster, recipient of the 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship in Drama. In these eleven, tightly-wound stories, Brewster turns clichés of boyhood and manhood on their heads, revealing the trappings and failures of American masculinity when viewed from any angle, especially a queer one.
A brash, young man recounts the life he shared with an older lover in rural, 1930s Oregon... queer teenagers navigate a family vacation on a remote lake... a gay retiree tries to outrun an apocalyptic sandstorm... and an aging alcoholic is transfixed by the return of a long-lost sibling, now trans. In the title story-connected to two others in the collection-a sound recordist who survived a violent car crash as a boy and a suicide attempt as a teenager, must find his place in the world between his love of film and the perils of Hollywood exploitation.
With sharp observation, cinematic detail, and wit, Stacy Brewster's What We Pick Up is intensely satisfying, with stories that span vastly different decades and landscapes. Brewster's stories of fathers, sons, brothers, and lovers-gay, bi, trans, queer-all manage to mix dark humor, earnest pathos, and a quiet reserve of hope to re-vision a different path forward for all of us.
STACY BREWSTER is a Portland author, poet, and screenwriter. His fiction and poetry have been featured in New South, The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, Gertrude, Buckmxn Journal, and The Madison Review, among numerous others. He was awarded the 2019 Oregon Literary Fellowship in Drama for GARGOYLES & DANDELIONS, an original queer noir television series set in 1940s Los Angeles, currently in development.
Sara Guest is a multi-genre writer and facilitator, sits on the board of small press publisher Fonograf and the Development Council of Literary Arts and writes and reads with the Henry Writers, Poetry Church, and the best Saturday night book group in the world.