Conversations from a Page is hosting an evening Literary Salon with Houston authors:

This Literary Salon is generously sponsored by The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship.

Chris Cander: A Gracious Neighbor
Amy Weinland Daughters: Dear Dana: That time I went crazy and wrote all 580 of my Facebook friends a handwritten letter
Tabitha Forney: Paper Airplanes
Ashley Winstead: Fool Me Once
Alison Wisdom: The Burning Season

Please bring along a bottle of your favorite wine or bubbly to share and we will have sweet and savory treats to nibble on while we enjoy all of the entertaining and lively conversation in a relaxed, in-home setting. To get any of the books signed at our event, they must be purchased from our independent book store affiliate Blue Willow Bookshop ahead of time or at the event.

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Featured

About A Gracious Neighbor

Martha Hale is an affable wife and mother who lives in an affluent neighborhood of well-tended lawns and high expectations. If only her clumsiness at penetrating the social circles of her neighbors weren’t making Martha so lonely.

That’s why she’s thrilled when the glamorous Minnie Foster, a former high school classmate, moves in next door. Despite Martha’s determination, picking up where they left off is trickier than anticipated—especially when their memories of the past don’t always align. But Martha is undeterred. In fact, her preoccupation with Minnie’s life, her success, and her marriage is becoming an obsession. When she sees a darkness and shame hiding inside Minnie’s perfectly deceptive home, Martha realizes that not even Minnie’s secrets are what they seem.

Visceral, sharp-witted, and deeply empathetic, A Gracious Neighbor explores the judgments women pass on one another and the ills of a society curated to keep them on the outside looking in.

About Chris Cander

Chris Cander is the USA Today bestselling author of The Weight of a Piano, which was named an Indie Next Great Read in both hardcover and paperback and which the New York Times called, “immense, intense and imaginative,” Whisper Hollow, also named an Indie Next Great Read, and 11 Stories, named by Kirkus as one of the best books of 2013 and winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards for fiction. She also wrote the children’s picture book The Word Burgler, and the Audible Originals “Eddies” and “Grieving Conversations.” Cander’s fiction has been published in twelve languages. She lives in her native Houston with her husband and two children.

Dear Dana: That time I went crazy and wrote all 580 of my Facebook friends a handwritten letter

About Dear Dana

When Amy Daughters reconnected with her old pal Dana on Facebook, she had no idea how it would change her life. Though the two women hadn’t had any contact in thirty years, it didn’t take them long to catch up—and when Amy learned that Dana’s son Parker was doing a second stint at St. Jude battling cancer, she was suddenly inspired to begin writing the pair weekly letters.

When Parker died, Amy—not knowing what else to do—continued to write Dana. Eventually, Dana wrote back, and the two became pen pals, sharing things through the mail that they had never shared before. The richness of the experience left Amy wondering something: If my life could be so changed by someone I considered “just a Facebook friend,” what would happen if I wrote all my Facebook friends a letter?

A whopping 580 handwritten letters later Amy’s life, and most of all her heart, would never, ever, be the same again. As it turned out, there were actual individuals living very real lives behind each social media profile, and she was beautifully connected to each of those extraordinary, flawed people for a specific reason. They loved her, and she loved them. And nothing—not politics, beliefs, or lifestyle—could separate them.

About Amy Weinland Daughters

A native Houstonian and a graduate of The Texas Tech University, Amy W. Daughters has been a freelance writer for more than a decade—mostly covering college football and sometimes talking about her feelings. Her debut novel, You Cannot Mess This Up: A True Story That Never Happened (She Writes Press, 2019), was selected as the Silver Winner for Humor in the 2019 Foreword INDIES and the Overall Winner for Humor/Comedy in the 2020 Next Generation Indie Awards. An amateur historian, hack golfer, charlatan fashion model, and regular on the ribbon dancing circuit, Amy—a proud former resident of Blackwell, England, and Dayton, Ohio—currently lives in Tomball, Texas, a suburb of Houston. She is married to a foxy computer person, Willie (53), and is the lucky mother of two amazing sons, Will (23) and Matthew (15).

About Paper Airplanes

It’s the end of summer, 2001. Erin O’Connor has everything she’s ever dreamed of: good friends, a high-powered career at a boutique Manhattan firm, and a husband she adores. They have plans for their life together: careers, children, and maybe even a house in the country. But life has other plans. Daniel works on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center.

Erin is drinking margaritas on a beach in Mallorca, helping her best friend get over a breakup, when she hears a plane has crashed into Daniel’s building. On a television at the smoky hotel bar, she watches his building collapse. She makes her way home with the help of a stranger named Alec, and once there, she haunts Ground Zero, nearby hospitals, and trauma centers, plastering walls and fences with missing-person flyers. But there’s no trace of Daniel.

After accepting Daniel’s death, Erin struggles to get her life back on track but makes a series of bad decisions and begins to live her life in a self-destructive fog of booze and pills. It’s not until she hits rock bottom that she realizes it’s up to her to decide: Was her destiny sealed with Daniel’s? Or is there life after happily ever after?

About Tabitha Forney

Tabitha Forney writes books to appease the voices in her head. She’s a mom, attorney, and ashtanga yogi who lives in Houston with her three kids and a husband who was on the 85th floor of the North Tower on 9/11 and lived to tell about it.

About Fool Me Once

Lee Stone is a 21st-century woman: She kicks butt at her job as a communications director at a women-run electric car company (that’s better than Tesla, thank you), and after work she is “Stoner,” drinking guys under the table and never letting any of them get too comfortable in her bed….

That’s because Lee’s learned one big lesson: Never trust love. Four major heartbreaks set her straight, from her father cheating on her mom all the way to Ben Laderman in grad school - who wasn’t actually cheating, but she could have swornhe was, so she reciprocated in kind.

Then Ben shows up five years later, working as a policy expert for the most liberal governor in Texas history, just as Lee is trying to get a clean energy bill rolling. Things get complicated - and competitive - as Lee and Ben are forced to work together. Tension builds just as old sparks reignite, fanning the flames for a romantic dustup the size of Texas.

About Ashley Winstead

Ashley Winstead holds a Ph.D. in contemporary American literature from Southern Methodist University and a B.A. in English and Art History from Vanderbilt University. She lives in Houston, TX, where she drinks red wine and dreams up novels.

About The Burning Season

“Here comes trouble,” Rosemary’s high school English teacher used to say whenever he saw her. Rosemary has often felt like trouble, and now at thirty-two, her marriage to her college sweetheart, Paul, is crumbling. In a last-ditch attempt to restore it, she agrees to give herself over to a newly formed Christian sect in central Texas, run by charismatic young pastor Papa Jake.

While Paul acclimates quickly to the small town of Dawson and the church’s insistence on a strict set of puritanical rules, Rosemary struggles to fit in. She finds purpose only when she’s called upon to help Julie, a new mother in the community, who is feeling isolated and lost.

Then the community is rocked by a series of fires which take some church members’ homes and nearly take their lives, but which Papa Jake says are holy and a representation of God’s will.

As the fires spread, and Julie is betrayed in a terrible way, Rosemary begins to question the reality of her life, and wonders if trouble will always find her—or if she’ll ever be able to outrun it.

About Alison Wisdom

Alison is a fiction writer whose work has appeared in Ploughshares, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. A graduate of Baylor University in Waco, TX, she also holds her MFA in fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Houston, TX with her husband and two children. She is the author of the novel We Can Only Save Ourselves.

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Evening Literary Salon with Houston Authors sponsored by The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship