An Evening with Laura Childs Gill in conversation with Caroline Cabrera

🎟 This event is FREE and open to the public and books will be available for purchase the night of the event! An RSVP grants general entry, but seating is not guaranteed, so please try and show up early. Please RSVP only if you intend to join us. Can't make the event?

"Writers only know how to begin," Laura Childs Gill declares in one of her many attempts to trace the origin of the desires that upended her comfortable life. Did it begin when she asked B. to get a beer? Or was the impulse inherited along her paternal side, a lineage of writers who'd also fallen in love outside of marriage — who'd also always been leaving? // In What a House Can Hold, Gill's meditative essays take form around her inability to neatly narrativize her domestic and creative crises. Visiting the houses of Dickinson, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, driving through the Florida Keys with her father, the Mojave Desert with her mother, and the American South alone, Gill searches for answers to her questions about how one leaves, and builds, a home. At once about the loss of a previous self and the acceptance of a new one, What a House Can Hold contends with, and exemplifies, what happens when the structures designed to contain us—marriages, homes, habits, self-mythologies—no longer can.

Laura Childs Gill is an author and teacher living in Miami, Florida. Her essays have been published in AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, West Branch, Washington Square Review, and Electric Literature, amongst others.

Caroline Cabrera is the author of the lyric essay collection, (lack begins as a tiny rumble) from Tinderbox Editions, as well as three poetry collections, Saint X (winner of the Hudson Prize from Black Lawrence Press), The Bicycle Year, and Flood Bloom, and two chapbooks, The Coma of the Comet (winner of the Burnside Review chapbook contest) and Dear Sensitive Beard (Dancing Girl Press). She holds an MFA in Poetry from The University of Massachusetts and serves as Artistic Director of O, Miami.