Thank you so much, Elizabeth, for that introduction.
And thanks to all of you for coming this evening.
Special thanks, of course, to the program for inviting me
to my former faculty, and to my classmates, Aisha and Matt,
and other people in the crowd amongst.
I'll never forget getting my acceptance letter to the MFA
program and asking myself, where is Tucson?
[LAUGHTER]
And having to get out a map and discover the answer
to that question.
And being from New England, I was
so excited to get to spend a few years in the Southwest,
in the desert.
And I'll also never forget reading one of Elizabeth Evans'
novels as I prepared to leave for Tucson,
and shocking myself and everyone else in a coffee shop
by reaching the end of the novel and bursting into tears.
[LAUGHTER]
The chance to get to study with faculty like Elizabeth,
and Aurelie, and many other people was just life changing.
So tonight I'm going to read a story from my debut story
collection, which came out about a year ago now.
It's called You Never Get It Back.
And the stories all follow a young woman from New England
through her early 20s into her mid 30s
as she moves around the country.
At first she studies the Optical Sciences,
and then she decides to become a writer.
And so the story I'll read from is called "Shoulder Season."
It takes place about 2/3 of the way through the book.
And she's deciding at that point to leave the graduate program
in Optical Science and to become a writer.
So it's set here in Tucson.