This session of readings brings together three authors whose works celebrate the vitality and sheer variety of writings drawn from real life. Native New Englanders love to talk about the weather; Boston writer Will Dowd likes to write about it, too, in his debut essay collection Areas of Fog, which also offers allusive meditations on history, literature, and the changing seasons. In Landslide, writer and translator Minna Zallman Proctor employs interconnected personal essays to make sense of her life’s relationships, from the complicated one with her mother to her own marriages and motherhood. Writer and artist Leslie Stein, whose comics diary regularly appears on Vice.com, collects her perceptive and bittersweet observations of life in New York in the beautiful and delicately illustrated collection Present. Our host for this session of thoughtful and eclectic essays is Anjali Mitter Duva, author of the novel Faint Promise of Rain and one of the curators of the Arlington Author Salon.
