Brenda Miller with Jane Wong — 'Love You, Bye'

Third Place Books welcomes award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her new book , a literary journey through caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. Jane Wong, author of , joins in conversation.

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A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller.

In Love You, Bye, award-winning author Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title--drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years--captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in the most ordinary expressions of love.

From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent, often finding that the sacred is embedded in the mundane. At the center of this collection lies the story of Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability.

Miller's voice moves seamlessly between prose and poetry, between humor and heartbreak, between the personal and the universal. She transforms the simple act of saying goodbye into an art form and the everyday language of love into something approaching prayer.

Essential reading for anyone navigating the complexities of aging parents, the mysteries of faith, or the simple courage required to keep loving in a world that can break our hearts.

Brenda Miller is the author of six essay collections and the poetry chapbook The Daughters of Elderly Women. Her work has received seven Pushcart prizes. She co-authored the textbook Tell it Slant: Creating, Refining, and Publishing Creative Nonfiction, and The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World. She is Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at Western Washington University.
Jane Wong is the author of the debut memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City, out now from Tin House. She is also the author of two books of poetry: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything from Alice James (2021) and Overpour from Action Books (2016). An associate professor of creative writing at Western Washington University, she grew up in New Jersey and currently lives in Seattle, Washington.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.

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