What: Jody Keisner, together in conversation with Kristine Langley Mahler, will discuss, read from, and sign her forthcoming release, Under My Bed and Other Essays
When: Sunday, September 18th at 2:00 p.m.
Where: The Bookworm, 2501 So. 90th St., Ste. 111
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About: In Under My Bed and Other Essays, Jody Keisner searches for the roots of the violence and fear that afflict women, starting with the working-class midwestern family she was adopted into and ending with her own experience of mothering daughters. She will read from and discuss the collection of essays alongside Kristine Langley Mahler, memorist and director & publisher of Split/Lip Press.
Jody Keisner was raised in rural Nebraska towns by a volatile father and kind but passive mother. As a young adult living alone for the first time, she began a nighttime ritual of checking under her bed each night, not sure who she was afraid of finding. An intruder? A monster? Her father? Keisner’s fears mature as she becomes a wife and mother, and the boogeyman under the bed shape-shifts, though its shapes are no less frightening—a young aunt’s drowning, the “chest chomp” in the classic horror movie The Thing, a diagnosis of a chronic autoimmune disease, the murder of a young college student, an eccentric grandmother’s belief in reincarnation and her dying advice: “Don’t be afraid.” In essays both literary and experimental, Keisner illustrates the tension between the illusion of safety, our desire for control, and our struggle to keep the things we fear from reaching out and pulling us under.
Jody Keisner is an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Threepenny Review, Brevity, Fourth Genre, and AARP’s the Girlfriend, among other periodicals. Find out more at www.jodykeisner.com.
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