Saturday, May 18, 2024 ~ 3:30 pm

Hosted by Bedrock Books at Lewis & Clark Library
120 S. Last Chance Gulch
Helena, Montana

Essayist and translator Jodi Varon and her poet husband David Axelrod have worked as colleagues in the literary arts for more than 40 years. Join them for an afternoon of back and forth conversation as each writer reads passages from their most recent books.  In so doing, they will reveal their unique perspectives on shared experience and the question: does time heal?

In Your Eyes Will Be My Window, Varon unspools how an afternoon of hunting morels with her family sparked a decade-long search for a lost link between her family, their home in Ukraine and both the faith and skepticism they brought with them to the New World.

Skiing with Dostoyevsky: New and Selected Poems, brings together pieces from Axelrod’s previous nine collections along with thirty-two new poems, the whole a kind of symphonic effort whose worldliness is rooted in both travel and “the lexicon of the local.”

Jodi Varon is the author of two memoirs in linked essays, most recently Your Eyes Will Be My Window, and also Drawing to an Inside Straight: The Legacy of an Absent Father, a WILLA Award finalist from Women Writing the West. A translator of the Tang Dynasty Chinese poet Li He, Varon's book of Li He's poems is The Rock's Cold Breath: Selected Poems of Li He. She is a professor emeritus of English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University and a founding editor with David Axelrod of basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts.

David Axelrod teaches letterpress printing at the University of Montana on a 1935 Hacker Test Press and founded Bear Scratch Press. In addition to the volumes selected from here, Axelrod has published two collections of personal essays, most recently, The Eclipse I Call Father. He and Jodi Varon live near Missoula where they tend a small native plants nursery.