WMRA's December Books & Brews: Sofia Samatar & Lucy Bryan

WMRA’s December Books & Brews features two authors. Sofia Samatar discusses her memoir, "The White Mosque", and Lucy Bryan discusses her work, "In Between Places: A Memoir in Essays."

Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 7pm.

Live at Pale Fire Brewing Company and available to view later on WMRA's Youtube Channel and on Facebook.

Signed copies of, The White Mosque, and In Between Places, are available online at Stone Soup Books.

About The White Mosque:

A  historical tapestry of border-crossing travelers, students, wanderers,  martyrs and invaders, The White Mosque is a memoiristic, prismatic  record of a journey through Uzbekistan and the strange shifts,  encounters, and accidents that combine to create an identity. In the  late nineteenth century, a group of German-speaking Mennonites traveled  from Russia into Central Asia, where their charismatic leader predicted  Christ would return. Over a century later, Sofia Samatar joins a tour  following their path, fascinated not by the hardships of their journey,  but by its aftermath: the establishment of a small Christian village in  the Muslim Khanate of Khiva. Named Ak Metchet, “The White Mosque,” after  the Mennonites’ whitewashed church, the village lasted for fifty years.

Sofia Samatar is the author of five books, most recently the memoir The White Mosque.  Her works include the award-winning epic fantasy A Stranger in Olondria  and Monster Portraits, an exploration of monsters in collaboration with  her brother, the artist Del Samatar.

About In Between Places:

In  her late twenties, writer and naturalist Lucy Bryan found herself in  between places. Her marriage to her first love had crumbled. Her beloved  father had died of cancer. Doubt had supplanted the faith that had  guided her since childhood. Uprooted and adrift, she turned to the  natural world in search of meaning, connection, and a renewed sense of  self. In this collection of essays, Bryan traverses familiar and  far-flung wildernesses, from the soaring cliffs of Yosemite National  Park to the bomb-pocked heath barrens of West Virginia's Dolly Sods  Wilderness to hidden ravines that shelter ancient ecosystems in the  Florida panhandle. She also invites readers on a contemplative journey.  Landscape, ecology, and human and natural history illuminate the  questions that emerge as she heals, falls in love again, and welcomes  her first child: Why isn't our species better at letting go? Why  (re)marry, when the institution of marriage fails so many? Why bring a  child into this world, knowing destruction will be its inheritance?

Lucy Bryan is a writer, adventurer, mother, teacher, and lover of alpenglow,  fungi, tiny streams, tall trees, native wildflowers, campfires,  homegrown vegetables, thunderstorms, and tents.