Book Release with Amy Leach and Scott F. Parker

Country Bookshelf is proud to present Amy Leach and Scott F. Parker as they discuss Leach's newest book The Salt of the Universe on Wednesday, August 7th at 6pm. Tickets are required for this event.

The event at a glance:

Before the event, preorder your copy of The Salt of the Universe! Registering for the event will be the equivalent of a preorder. Preorders are great for authors, bookstores, and customers alike. If you preorder the book now, it will be a like a gift to your future self when the book comes out! And it will benefit the author and bookstores by demonstrating a demand for the book. Let's show our local author some love and bump up those preorder numbers!

On August 7th, please arrive early to secure your seat. Seating is general admission first come, first serve.

At 6:00pm the event program featuring Amy Leach and Scott F. Parker will begin. The authors will take audience questions following their program.

After the talk, Amy Leach and Scott F. Parker will be available for signing books.

Can't attend in person? Order a signed copy of The Salt of the Universe on our website! Online orders will need to be placed 24 hours before the event.

About The Salt of the Universe:

Where does freedom live?

Why does it sometimes feel so good to be told what to do?

What on heaven and earth is an apicklypse?

The Salt of the Universe raises these and other questions out of Amy Leach’s experience, including her time playing fiddle and her childhood in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, with its many prohibitions (coffee, dancing) and its emphasis on the apocalypse. The book argues against argument, but most of all against fundamentalisms of all kinds and their limiting effect on our humanity.

After listening to thousands of sermons, Leach has written her own unceremonious sermon on the dangers of dogma. “To borrow the words of an old hymn: This is my story, this is my song."

In the company of four-year-old mystics and six-year-old geologists and bears and butterflies and willow trees, after a lifetime of playing the piano in church and dance halls, Leach praises not obedience but freedom, not secondhand but firsthand thoughts, not homogeneity but heterogeneity. She champions Emily Dickinson and Jesus over interfering prophets, questions over answers, unpredictability over predictability, the soul over the institution, Miles Davis over miles of marching.

Leach reminds us, amid a delight of linguistic cartwheels, philosophical shenanigans, and love songs to the earth, that we must run toward mischief, music, love, the wonders of nature, and the wild joys of experience and improvisation.

Amy Leach is the author of The Everybody Ensemble and Things That Are. She grew up in Texas and earned her MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa. Her work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and numerous other publications, including Granta, A Public Space, Orion, Tin House, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is a recipient of a Whiting Award in Nonfiction, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Pushcart Prize. Leach lives in Montana.

Scott F. Parker is the author of The Joy of Running qua Running and A Way Home: Oregon Essays, among other books. His writing has appeared in the Believer, Assay, Sport Literate, Tin House, and other publications. He lives in Bozeman with his family.

Accessibility Information:

The event will take place on the first floor of Country Bookshelf.

All doorways have a width greater than 32 inches with the narrowest being our front door at 35 inches.

The speaker will be using a microphone at this event. Additionally, there will be seating reserved for folks who are hard of hearing in the front row.

Please email staff@countrybookshelf.com if you have any specific accessibility needs and we will do our best to serve you!

Do you or someone you know provide ASL interpretation? Country Bookshelf is seeking an interpreter to call on for future events. Please send information to staff@countrybookshelf.com if there is interest!