Michele M Feeney discusses Like Family

Name: Michele M Feeney discusses Like Family
Start: 2025-01-15T12:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-01-15T13:00:00-07:00
Location: 4014 N Goldwater Blvd, Ste 101, Scottsdale, AZ, United States, Arizona 85251

Schedule

Wed Jan 15 2025 at 12:00 pm to 01:00 pm

UTC-07:00

Location

4014 N Goldwater Blvd, Ste 101, Scottsdale, AZ, United States, Arizona 85251 | Scottsdale, AZ

This event kicks off our new Author Afternoons program. It will take place upstairs in our annex space. It will be live in-person only. We will not be streaming it online.

Michele M Feeney. Like Family (Black Rose Publishing, $19.95).
“In Like Family, Feeney not only brings us back to the terrifying time when the Spanish flu had its hold on us, but also beautifully explores the meaning of family.” –Ann Hood, author of The Stolen Child
Mollie Crowley, a 26-year-old Irish unmarried teacher at a one-room schoolhouse in rural Michigan, and 8-year-old Cecilia Pokorski, a Polish girl orphaned after the deaths of her family during the 1918 influenza pandemic, are an unlikely pair.
While Cecilia is grieving the loss of her beloved Mamusia, Mollie leans on her own mother, Catherine, for assistance after taking the girl into their home. Mollie loves teaching, but Cecilia hated having Mollie as her first teacher.
In their town in rural Michigan, the Irish and the Polish don't mix. The Catholic Church, the town's doctor, and Mollie's older brothers are pitted against Mollie, who is highly independent, even stubborn. Everyone who fears "the sickness" is desperate to stay safe and healthy, and unsure of what precautions work.
Cecilia is treated with suspicion, even fear. Mollie, Cecilia, and Catherine, while isolated on their family farm, face all these struggles with courage and creativity.
Readers will see challenges they faced during COVID-19 as similar to the ones people faced nearly a hundred years earlier. Like Family explores themes of prejudice related to ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and religion; foster care and adoption; feminism; education and teaching; language and cultural differences; family factions; death and grief; loneliness; and ultimately, the power of love, family (biological and intentional), and community.

Michele Feeney is an award-winning writer and lawyer, teacher, wife, and mother of five children. She resides in Arizona and in Michigan, where she owns part of a Christmas tree farm her ancestors homesteaded in 1850. Michele pursued her passion for creative writing for 20 years before she earned an MFA from Bennington College in June 2022 in the genres of fiction and nonfiction. Her first novel, Like Family, will be released by Black Rose Writing in August 2024.

Michele began her creative writing career almost 20 years ago, starting with an online short story class offered by Writer's Digest. Since then, she has continually taken online and in-person classes, and attended many conferences, including several sessions of the University of Michigan's Bear River Writing Conference and the Breadloaf Writing Conference. She has served as an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine since 2017, evaluating both "Story of the Week" and "Six-Word-Story" submissions. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Literary & Prologue Society of the Southwest.

Having raised five children (biological and adopted) and welcomed three grandchildren, Michele managed navigating the COVID-19 pandemic as a family affair. While doing so, she remembered a story told to her by her grandmother and was inspired to imagine how families and community members in rural Michigan navigated their way through the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1918. That story inspired her first novel, Like Family.
Michele is currently working on short stories, a book of essays about a young man incarcerated in the Arizona Department of Corrections system, and the second volume of the Like Family, which will be a series.