First Draft: A Dialogue On Writing W/ Sarah Gerard
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing
W/ Sarah Gerard
January 14, 2025 @ 6:30 pm – 11:59 pm
FREE W/ RSVP
SEATED SHOW / ALL AGES
ABOUT FIRST DRAFT: A DIALOGUE ON WRITING
Genre: PANEL
First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing is a literary podcast produced and hosted by Mitzi Rapkin. Each week the podcast features an in-depth interview with a fiction, non-fiction, essay, or poetry writer. The show is equal parts investigation into the craft of writing and conversation about the topics of an author’s work.
ABOUT CARRIE CAROLYN COCO: MY FRIEND, HER MURDER, AND AN OBSESSION WITH THE UNTHINKABLE
On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?
This is the question that has plagued acclaimed author Sarah Gerard and driven her obsessive pursuit to understand this horrific tragedy. In Sarah’s exploration of Carolyn’s life and death, she spent thousands of hours interviewing Carolyn’s and Render’s friends and family, poring over court documents and news media, reading obscure writings and internet posts, and attending Carolyn’s memorials and Render’s trial.
What emerged from Sarah’s relentless instinct to follow a story and its characters to their darkest ends is a book that is at once a striking homage to Carolyn’s life, a chilling excavation of a brutal crime, and a captivating whydunit with a shocking conclusion.mics of love and friendship, the vexing nature of families, the universal desire to create something lasting and beautiful, and of course, the species-long partnership between Homo sapiens and Canis familiaris.
ABOUT SARAH GERARD
Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State, a New York Times Critics’ and NPR Best Book of the Year, a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; the novels True Love and Binary Star, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize; a co-authored art book, Recycle; and the chapbook The Butter House. Her new book of investigative journalism is called Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable. Sarah’s short stories, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, T Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, The Believer, Vice, Electric Literature, among other publications. She holds an MFA from The New School and is a graduate student in the criminal justice program at CU Denver, studying gender-based violence. She’s a private investigator in Denver.
Learn more about Sarah Gerard: WEBSITE
ABOUT MITZI RAPKIN
Mitzi Rapkin is the founder, host and producer of the literary podcast, “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing,” which features a new author interview each week. She has interviewed more than 500 contemporary writers of fiction, nonfiction, essays, and poetry over the past eleven years. Her conversations explore essential questions about what it means to be human alongside the craft of writing and the themes of the writers’ works. Rapkin is also a journalist, fiction writer, certified integral coach, facilitator, and fiction-writing instructor.
Learn more about / Listen to First Draft: WEBSITE
DETAILS
- EVENT @ 6:30 pm / DOORS @ 5:30 pm
- SEATED SHOW / ALL AGES
- Limit of 4 tickets per purchaser
Presented By: The Arts Campus At Willits