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Monday May 23, 2022 – 6:00-7:00 PM EDT
Price: Free · Duration: 1 hr
Location: Pat Conroy Literary Center (601 Bladen St., Beaufort)
Online: The author conversation will also be live-streamed on the Conroy Center Facebook page.
Our nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with William Walsh, author of the debut novel Lakewood, on Monday, May 23, at 6:00 p.m. at the Conroy Center (601 Bladen St.).
This event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for sale and signing. Seating is limited; please call to reserve your spot: 843-379-7025. The author conversation will also be live-streamed on the Conroy Center Facebook page.
Website: Facebook Event Page
ABOUT LAKEWOOD
“Secret rooms, buried grief, the turbulence of love. The appealing young man who narrates this engaging novel encounters them all on a momentous journey through a summer in which he must face the ghosts of the past and the challenges of the present on his way to a future all his own.” —Pam Durban, author of All Set About with Fever Trees and Other Stories
“’I want what I say to be more than myself,’ introspective college student Robert English commits to his typescript journal in a summer of self-discovery spent housesitting for the new owners of his childhood home, the site of his sister’s death eleven years prior.
William Walsh’s Lakewood takes us deeply into Robert’s wounded psyche as he navigates the hauntings of his past and the uncertainty of the future. His tribulations in love and betrayal, immersion into great novels, and discovery of long hidden secrets impart lessons for Robert and for Walsh’s readers of our capacity to understand and forgive ourselves and one another. Walsh has long established himself as a multifaceted Swiss Army knife of a writer, and Lakewood further distinguishes him as a masterful storyteller to be read again and again.” —Jonathan Haupt, co-editor of Our Prince of Scribes: Writers Remember Pat Conroy
In 1973, in idyllic Lakewood, New York, this beautiful coming-of-age story is about a lonely college student who returns to his hometown eleven years after his twin sister’s death. Robert English accepts a summer job housesitting for his history professor. If Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel proclaimed you can never return home, Robert attempts the impossible, to return to his childhood to reconcile his past, to find answers to his sister’s death, to have a summer of adventure and love, to overcome the family torment for what they did not prevent, and to ease the guilt he suffers as a sole survivor. While housesitting, Robert returns to his childhood to reconcile his family’s tragedy, but along the way, he finds adventure, love, and sex. This young medical student, flawed like all men and women, loses the one woman he truly loves and finds himself alone again. Lust, lies, and seduction tempt him away from her and leave him damaged, almost beyond repair. He must find a way back into her heart.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
William Walsh is the author of seven other books, including the award-winning collection of poems, Fly Fishing in Times Square (Červená Barva Press). He is the director of the Reinhardt University undergraduate creative writing program and the MFA program. Widely published in some of the finest journals including Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, and Literary Matters, he is also known for his literary interviews, which have included: Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, A.R. Ammons, Richard Blanco, Eavan Boland, Pat Conroy, Harry Crews, James Dickey, Rita Dove, Mary Hood, Ursula Le Guin, Andrew Lytle, and Lee Smith.
Born in Jamestown, NY and raised in Lakewood until moving south in 1972, his historical family has resided in Chautauqua County since pre-Revolutionary War. A graduate of Georgia State University and Vermont College, he resides in Atlanta with his family. He is the director of the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at Reinhardt University, in Waleska, where he teaches literature and creative writing. He is the editor of the “James Dickey Review”. When not writing, he spends time with his family, enjoys competitive tennis and golf, as well as playing chess internationally.
