To celebrate the 20th year of Pasadena’s One City, One Story community reading project, the public is invited to a conversation with Susan Straight, author of this year’s selection In the Country of Women, Thursday, March 10, at 7 p.m. on Zoom. Straight will discuss her experiences writing this memoir. A question-and-answer session will immediately follow. The event is free and open to the public. To attend, sign up here: https://pasadena.
In the Country of Women is set in the inland Southern California city of Riverside, near the desert and the Mexican border. There Straight, a white self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at weekly driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family, Straight―and eventually her three daughters―learned the stories of Dwayne’s ancestors. Some women escaped violence in post-slavery Tennessee, some escaped murder in Jim Crow Mississippi, and some fled abusive men. Straight’s mother-in-law, Alberta Sims, is the descendant at the heart of this memoir. Straight’s family, too, reflects the hardship and gumption of women pushing onward―from Switzerland, Wisconsin, Canada, and the Colorado Rockies to California.
In the Country of Women is a valuable social history and a personal narrative that reads like a love song to America and indomitable women.
Straight was born in Riverside and still lives there with her family. She’s passionate about home, California, the Santa Ana River, the foothills and the deserts, and has been writing about Southern California and the inland area for 40 years. From her kitchen window, she can see the hospital where she was born, which her three daughters find kind of hilarious and pathetic. Most days, she walks her dog Angel beside the Santa Ana River, a path she’s followed since childhood, and then past the classrooms at Riverside City College, where she wrote her first short story at 16. In addition to In the Country of Women, she’s published eight novels and two books for children. Her short stories and essays have been published everywhere from The New Yorker to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian to Alta, The Believer, McSweeneys, Zoetrope, Reader’s Digest, Real Simple and Family Circle. She’s been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a California Gold Medal for Fiction, and the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes.
Pasadena Public Library’s annual One City, One Story program is designed to broaden and deepen an appreciation of reading in Pasadena by engaging the community in dialog around a single literary work. For more information on this year’s One City, One Story activities, visit http://cityofpasadena.
