Beaufort County Libraries: Hilton Head Branch

The Pat Conroy Literary Center’s Visiting Writers Series presents poet, novelist, and memoirist Beth Ann Fennelly, for a discussion of her writing life and her most recently book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs. Free and open to the public, this event is presented in partnership with the Beaufort County Library System’s Hilton Head Island branch library. This program is sponsored in part by South Carolina Humanities, a not-for-profit organization; inspiring, engaging and enriching South Carolinians with programs on literature, history, culture and heritage.

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating & Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these micro-memoirs build on one another to arrive at a portrait of Beth Ann Fennelly as a wife, mother, writer, and deeply original observer of life’s challenges and joys. Some pieces are wistful, some wry, and many reveal the humor buried in our everyday interactions.

“Beth Ann Fennelly’s genre-defying collection is so engaging and readable that you won’t even notice how much you’re learning about confronting the hardest challenge we all share: being human. Wise, irreverent, funny… Everyone should read this book.”–Atlanta Journal Constitution

“Heating and Cooling contains essays that are sometimes as short as 10 words… but add up to a surprisingly maximalist portrait of a life.”–New York Times Book Review

“The micro-memoirs showcase a range of emotions that belies their brevity―taken from another standpoint, their brevity is what gives them power.”–Wall Street Journal

“Varying in length from a single sentence to several pages, the essays in [Heating and Cooling] are told with wry self-awareness and compassion.”–Poets & Writers

“Fennelly recounts episodes, events, or earned truths that, given her poignant reflection and graceful, often-funny telling, are sure to stop readers in their tracks… This deceptively slim, convention-defying collection delivers unerringly generous rewards.”–Booklist

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About the author:

Beth Ann Fennelly, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. Fennelly has published three poetry books: Open House, Tender Hooks, and Unmentionables. She is also the author of a book of essays, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother, the historical novel The Tilted World (co-authored with her husband Tom Franklin), and most recently Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs.