Amanda Cockrell will be here to discuss her novel Coyote Weather. She will do a reading and discuss the writing process, including how and why she wrote this book - a novel based on historical events.

Annie Dillard said to beware of writing about your memories, because in doing so you will alter them forever. This is especially true for fiction writers who scoop up memory and alter it to suit us. The imagined scene becomes more real than the actual event. This book took me 20 years to write and in the process went from a contemporary novel set in the recent past to a historical novel. The reason I wrote it, however, never changed. Every man of my generation has some mark, psychic or physical, left on him from that war. This book is for them, and for the women who lived through it with them or who could not.