Join Stone Soup Books for a special event "Packing up the Past" at the Shenandoah Valley Arts Center in Waynesboro.

Stone Soup Books is honored to host this special event with two celebrated authors:

Marietta McGarty and Russell Hart share personal accounts of packing up a loved one's belongings. Facilitated by Bonner Odell, founder of The Writer's Well, they will discuss the journeys in their acclaimed books:

Leaving 1203: Emptying a Home~ Filling the Heart

by Marietta McGarty

About the Book: Bereaved following her mother’s death, McCarty faces the daunting task of emptying her beloved family home. How might she find a way through the inevitable emotional turmoil and the accumulation of more than five decades in the house at 1203?

Told with McCarty’s characteristic wisdom, marvel, exuberance, and good will,

LEAVING 1203 is about navigating that way through.  The author draws on all available resources—friends and strangers, food and laughter, life lessons learned in the very house she now empties, and, not least, her newly-inherited West Highland terrier, Billy.  McCarty simultaneously learns and deftly teaches the fine arts of remembering, letting go, and holding on to what matters most.  She not only finds the way through, she shows the way.

An engaging raconteur, McCarty invites you in and welcomes you home. She exposes her generous heart and pulls you close. This wondrous volume is a gift to its readers—a hug, long held.

While home emptiers might find special comfort and resonance in LEAVING 1203, no home-emptying experience—actual or anticipated—is necessary for the reader’s enjoyment and appreciation of this book.

About the Author: Marietta McCarty’s fourth book titled Leaving 1203: Emptying a Home, Filling the Heart released to her great delight October 9, 2018. She is the author of bestseller Little Big Minds: Sharing Philosophy with Kids, Nautilus Gold Award winner How Philosophy Can Save Your Life: 10 Ideas That Matter Most, and The Philosopher’s Table: How to Start Your Philosophy Dinner Club—Monthly Conversation, Music, and Recipes.

Marietta enjoyed lively philosophy circles among her college students at Piedmont Virginia

Community College in Charlottesville, Virginia for more than two decades before setting off on her career as an author. Her books lead her into new circles of fledgling philosophers of all ages—on playgrounds, in dining rooms, through back doors into kitchens, through front doors into libraries and restaurants, at business meetings and after-work parties.

Defining philosophy as “the art of clear thinking,” in 2013 Marietta brought all the mental clarity she could muster to the emotional and physical challenge of emptying her family home of fifty-six years.

Returning to her hometown, the three months of home emptying taught her anew the old lessons in good living. She experienced, firsthand and unforgettably, the meaning of joy, kindness, relationship, empathy, generosity, and gratitude, for example, longtime core ideas central to her philosophical teaching. Marietta’s crystal-clear memories evoked as home emptier proved that the foundation of her first three books was cemented long ago in the bricks and mortar of the old home.

As I Found It: My Mother's House

By Russell Hart

About the Book: American photographer, writer, and teacher Russell Hart offers a highly focused visual essay about memory and the ways in which dementia destroys identity and personal history. The book’s images are also an intimate study, through idiosyncratic objects and their settings, of an aging parent. The author created the photographs in his mother’s house of over forty years after cognitive decline made it impossible for her to stay. Some of the images show the home’s interiors as he emptied it out for sale. Others are close-ups of the hundreds of boxed arrangements of objects assembled by his mother, a hoarder, for both practical and sentimental purposes. Yet the book’s narrative is sparing, leaving room for viewers to find evocations of their own experience, of caring for struggling family members and preserving a lifetime’s memories.

About the Author/Photographer: Russell Hart’s work has been widely exhibited at galleries and museums that include the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newport Art Museum,

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the Addison

Gallery of American Art, the New Britain Museum of American Art, and the

DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, among many others. His

prints are held in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Rose

Art Museum at Brandeis University, the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers,

NY, and various other public and private collections. He has been the

recipient of numerous residencies and fellowships in photography, including

three traveling fellowships awarded by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. His

artwork has been featured in a variety of publications, including Harper’s

Magazine, Camera Arts, Fotografare, and The Boston Globe Magazine.

Hart has taught photography at Tufts University and the Boston Museum

School, and currently teaches in the Master’s in digital photography program

at New York’s School of Visual Arts. He was for many years Executive Editorof American Photo magazine, where he wrote about photography for severaldecades. His writing on photographic subjects has also appeared in The New

York Times, Men's Journal, and La Repubblica delle Donne, among other publications. Hart was a member of the American Photo editorial team that won the American Society of Magazine Editors’ 1994 National Magazine Award for General Excellence. He received the 2003 Gold Medal for Best General Feature from the International Regional Magazine Association, and in 2006 the Lucie Foundation’s award for best photographic magazine. In 2009 he received the Griffin Museum of Photography’s Susan Sontag Scribe Award for best photographic writing. Hart has written several books on photographic subjects, including the original Photography For Dummies and his newly

published monograph As I Found It: My Mother’s House (Kehrer Verlag).

Stone Soup Books is proud to collaborate with the Shendandoah Valley Arts Center for this important event. Guests should enter by way of the Main St. entrance.

Books will be for sale at event, and authors will be available for signing.

Refreshments will be offered.