Matthew Salesses - TO GRIEVE IS TO CARRY ANOTHER TIME

Brazos welcomes Matthew Salesses on Wednesday, January 13, 2027, in conversation with Lacy M. Johnson. From the critically acclaimed author of The Sense of Wonder and Craft in the Real World comes a deeply personal, poignant memoir, weaving together Salesses’ multiple identities: adoptee, Asian American, husband, father, and, finally, widower. Matthew Salesses has spent his career writing about the power of storytelling, but he wasn’t prepared for the story of his own life to fall apart. A Korean American adoptee, Salesses grew up unsure of who he was—until he fell in love and started a family with a native Korean, Cathreen. But when Cathreen was diagnosed with stage four stomach cancer, the map they made together suddenly led nowhere. After her untimely death, Salesses realized he would need new paths, new stories, new philosophies, new ways of understanding the world, to navigate the unknown landscape of loss. To Grieve Is To Carry Another Time is a stunning, thought-provoking meditation on what grief can offer the grieving, illuminating the way to embracing yourself, finding your community, and even loving and changing the world. Matthew Salesses is the author of The Sense of Wonder (Little, Brown, 2023), Craft in the Real World (Catapult Books, 2021), Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear (Little A, 2020), and other books. He was adopted from Korea and lives in Blacksburg, VA, where he is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing in the Virginia Tech MFA Program.Lacy M. Johnson is the author of four books, including The Past and Possible World: A Field Guide to Restoring Ecosystems, Communities, and Hope, forthcoming from Scribner. She is co-editor, with Cheryl Beckett, of More City Than Water: A Houston Flood Atlas. She directs the MFA program in creative writing at Rice University, where she teaches nonfiction as the Bruce and Elizabeth Dunlevie Professor of Creative Writing.