Why Fly

The ascent of flight, the descent of love: Caroline Paul’s new book, Why Fly: Seeking Awe, Healing, and Our True Selves in the Sky, examines her growing obsession with piloting a strange-looking aircraft called a gyrocopter as her 15-year-marriage is falling apart. In conversation with author Courtney Martin, she will discuss the human compulsion to become avian—as well as what flight can teach us about the crash-landings of the heart. If recent news of colliding planes worries you, if you are curious about the physics of getting a passenger aircraft aloft, fascinated with birds of all stripes, or interested in the vagaries of the human heart, this is a night for you: pilots, non-pilots, and those terrified of stepping foot on a passenger plane.

Leave your luggage at home and arrive an hour early to enjoy the bar and the ambiance at Clio's. Then buckle up, adjust seat to upright position, and join Caroline and Courtney as they investigate the ways that flight, like love, confounds and transforms us.

Courtney Martin writes a popular weekly newsletter called Examined Family and has published four books. Her most recent is Learning in Public: Lessons for a Racially Divided America From My Daughter’s School. Courtney is also a two-time TED talker, and she is a co-founder and board member of the Solutions Journalism Network, popularizing the practice of rigorous, compelling reporting about responses to social problems. She co-founded FRESH Speakers Bureau and has served as the storyteller-in-residence of The Holding Co., a lab to redesign care.

Caroline Paul is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Gutsy Girl, Escapades for Your Life of Epic Adventure, as well as Tough Broad: From Bird Watching to BASE Jumping, How Outdoor Adventure Improves Our Lives as We Age. She is a long-time member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Why Fly is her eighth published book.

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