The Writer’s Center welcomes writer and longtime Johns Hopkins professor Mark Farrington for a reading from his new novel LOSS OF LIFE and discussion of fiction techniques with former student and author Michelle Brafman.
FREE & open to the public. RSVP below.
Mark Farrington recently retired after teaching thirty years in the Johns Hopkins University MA in Writing Program, including time spent as director of the program as well as director of the MA in Teaching Writing Program. He has published short fiction in CARVE, Craft Literary, The Valparaiso Review, and other journals, along with various articles on writing and the teaching of writing. Loss of Life is his first novel. After living for three decades in Alexandria, Virginia, following his retirement he and his wife moved to Portland, Maine. Learn more at markfarrington.net.
Michelle Brafman is the author of Washing the Dead, Bertrand Court, and Swimming with Ghosts, the companion novel to Draw Near to Me. Her work has appeared in Oprah Daily, O Quarterly, Slate, LitHub, Tabl
About LOSS OF LIFE
In a Virginia hospital, forty-one-year-old Matthew Winton awakens from a car accident with no memory of his life after the age of thirteen.
Over time, he learns that he is a college professor who lives alone and has no family. He is also a writer, and he turns first to his writing, hoping it will show him his past. But he has written primarily fiction, and he struggles to separate the blurred lines between fiction and fact. He is helped by a policewoman who investigated his accident, and a relationship develops. Then he comes upon something he’d written shortly before the crash. This writing disturbs him greatly and leads to a series of events that end with him traveling to Massachusetts, where he spent the first thirty years of his life, in search of ghosts from his past. Throughout, he’s been troubled by questions raised by the car accident. What was he doing out on a deserted country road at two o’clock on a Sunday morning? He had no luggage in the car, nor anything that might have given a clue to his intentions. Even the policewoman who investigated seems to have questions about whether the crash was really an accident. As Matthew learns more about his past, he fears that his search might end back on that deserted country road at two a.m.
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