Reading with Tommy Hays

Tuesday, September 15 11:00 am – 11:45 am Ashe County Public Library This event is free and open to the public, no registration required. Join us for a reading with Tommy Hays with time for audience Q&A. TOMMY HAYS Tommy Hays’ new novel, published in March of this year, is The Marriage Bed (Blair). His novel The Pleasure Was Mine(St. Martin’s Press) was a Finalist for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Fiction Award, and was chosen for numerous community reads and read on NPR’s “Radio Reader”. His other adult novels are Sam’s Crossing(Atheneum) and In the Family Way (Random House), winner of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award. Tommy’s middle grade novel, What I Came to Tell You (Egmont USA), was chosen as a SIBA Okra Pick. He’s published stories and various pieces in magazines and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, Smoky Mountain Living, The Chattahoochee Review and storySouth. He was inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors and named to the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the governor of North Carolina. He’s a member of National Book Critics Circle. He is retired Founding Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program and Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program at UNC Asheville. He received his BA in English from Furman University and graduated from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. https://tommyhays.com A freak accident comes on the heels of a startling revelation—laying bare the foundation of a marriage, and a husband is left to grapple with the aftermath. A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife Betsy inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple end up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world. Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn’t know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive and, more important, rededicate himself to being a father.