Artsmith Salon Series Presents a Reading by Tarn Wilson

Tuesday, June 14, 6 p.m., Darvill’s Bookstore

— from JoEllen Moldoff —

This Tuesday is a rare chance to hear author Tarn Wilson read from her memoir, The Slow Farm. In the early 1970s, Wilson’s father quit his job as the Brookings Institution’s first computer programmer, packed his family into a converted school bus with “Suck Nixon” painted on the side, and headed for the Canadian wilderness. He planned to give his two young children an Edenic childhood, free from the shadows of war, materialism, and middle class repression. Between each lyric chapter, told from the child’s point of view, Wilson incorporates “artifacts” that reveal larger cultural forces shaping her parents’ decisions: letters, photographs, timelines, newspaper clippings, excerpts from radical approaches to child rearing. In the space between the child’s vision and the adult context, readers are invited to consider the gifts and burdens of a counterculture childhood.

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, published by Judith Kitchen’s Ovenbird Books, about her early years with her hippy parents on Texada Island in British Columbia. She has settled in the heart of shiny and fast-paced Silicon Valley, so far from the outhouses and kerosene lamps of her rural childhood that she sometimes feels as if she’s lived two hundred years. She has been published by Brevity, Defunct, Gulf Stream, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Inertia, River Teeth, Ruminate, South Loop Review, and The Sun, among others. In addition to her regular gig as a high school teacher in the Bay Area, she has taught in workshops across the US, from Maine to Oregon. She earned a master’s in education from Stanford and an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Tuesday’s 6:00 pm reading will be followed by a Q&A, booksigning, and author reception with light hors d’oeuvres.