WordPlay bookstore will host southern fiction author Susan Gregg Gilmore for an author talk and book signing on Saturday, November 1, at 4 PM, at a very special location: St Peter’s Lutheran Church, located right next to WordPlay at 60 West Main Street in Wardensville. Doors open at 3:30PM so attendees enjoy hymns and other sacred music performed on the church’s organ by local musician Patty Austin.
Faith and small-town church life are interwoven in Gilmore’s newest novel, The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush. The book centers around 12-year-old Leonard who loses his leg in a freak accident and decides to give his leg a proper burial in the hilltop cemetery of his East Tennessee town. This event somehow sets off a chain of miraculous and catastrophic happenings—upending the lives of Leonard’s rigidly God-fearing mother June, his deeply conflicted father Emmett, and his best friend Azalea and her mother Rose, who is also the town prostitute. While the local Baptist minister passes judgment on events and promises dire consequences, the people of this small community move together toward awakening.
“This is a book of loss and grief and most importantly healing and hope,” Gilmore explains. “And it’s all told, I believe, with both tenderness and humor. I think we can all relate to these themes.”
Gilmore’s time in Wardensville will be her first author event in West Virginia. “This is my first and only book visit to West Virginia and I cannot wait,” she says. “I drove through the state often, making my way from Chattanooga to my daughter’s home in Pittsburgh, and I am so drawn to the beauty of West Virginia. Now I get to spend some time with the people of Wardensville, and I am so looking forward to our time together.”
The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush follows Gilmore’s other southern-centric fiction, including Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen, The Improper Life of Bezellia Grove, and The Funeral Dress. Susan has written for Chattanooga Times Free Press, Los Angeles Times, and Christian Science Monitor. Her love of storytelling flows naturally from her Tennessee roots. She’s the daughter of a revival preacher’s son, brought up on the land and streams that populate her latest novel that is, as Appalachian novelist Lee Smith says, a “homespun Pilgrim’s Progress set at a dairy farm on Big Sugar River in East Tennessee in 1961.”
Copies of The Curious Calling of Leonard Bush are available for purchase at WordPlay and also online through Bookshop.org. The November 1 event at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church is free and open to the public; no registration required. For more information, email info@wordplaywv.com.
