In-Store Reading: Mark Lawton: Updates from the Senior Center

Annie Bloom's welcomes Portland author Mark Lawton for a reading from his new story collection, Updates from the Senior Center. He'll be in conversation with Jackie Shannon Hollis, whose memoir is This Particular Happiness: A Childless Love Story.

Signed and personalized copies of Updates from the Senior Center are available! Please, please, please include the name for personalization in the order notes; or indicate "signed only."

About Updates from the Senior Center:

We all get old, if we're lucky. But Mark Lawton's irrepressible father, John, isn't going to do it quietly, no matter what rules the nincompoops at his retirement home try to impose on him. In this series of lovingly playful vignettes, Mark tries, and mostly fails, to keep up with his dad, supporting him through his trial for splashing in the serenity pool, cheering him on in walker races, teaching him to (kind of) use modern technology, and mediating his many disputes with geezers and wardens alike. "If you can't laugh, you'll cry, so don't cry" is Mark's advice to anyone supporting an aging parent in this gently humorous zine that does justice to a larger-than-life figure who's no longer quite as steady on his feet as he used to be.

Mark Lawton is a writer, math teacher, coach, and software designer, based in Portland, Oregon. His works in progress include a thriller about corruption in international soccer, a novel navigating political activism, and a series of essays on men making meaning. Mark has three Masters degrees (and one half of another dangling there as unfinished business). He was the recipient of a Klingenstein Fellowship in teaching from Columbia University and the Esther Dayman-Strong Lectureship in the Humanities. Mark is mildly accomplished in rock-climbing, kite-boarding, bike-racing, and Spanish. He is recognized as an expert napper and has given demos on multiple continents.

Jackie Shannon Hollis, a lifelong Oregonian, resides with her husband in a home her friends call the tree house. Her education and work as a counselor pushed her to hold up the mirror to her own self. In addition to thinking she would be a mother, she once dreamed of being a June Taylor dancer or a racecar driver.