Jonathan Johnson: The Desk on the Sea

Friday, October 11, 2019 - 7:00pm to 8:30pm

Please join us to welcome local favorite and Eastern Washington University professor in-store, Jonathan Johnson, for a reading of his new memoir "The Desk on the Sea". Johnson will be joined by treasured Spokane musician and Girls Rock Lab co-founder Liz Rognes who will play original and traditional Celtic tunes.

About "The Desk on the Sea":

The Desk on the Sea begins four years after American poet Jonathan Johnson spread his mother’s ashes in her beloved Lake Superior and moved with his wife and young daughter into a seventeenth-century cottage on Scotland’s North Sea. On an idyllic, desolate coast and in the wild Highlands, he began his search for a way to live through ongoing grief and to take in the wonder of each new day. Sustained by an unwavering belief that words can help us fully occupy our lives, and that imagination and empathy can transform suffering into what John Keats called "soul-making," Johnson offers readers a raw look at love and loss.

About Jonathan Johnson:

Jonathan Johnson’s two newly-published books are May Is an Island (poems) and The Desk on the Sea (Memoir). His previous works include the poetry collections Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves, the memoir Hannah and the Mountain, and the play Ode about John Keats and Fanny Brawne. His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry, published widely in literary magazines, and read on National Public Radio. He is a professor in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

Event address: 
Auntie's Bookstore
402 W Main Ave
Spokane, WA 99201
Books: 
The Desk on the Sea (Made in Michigan Writers) By Jonathan Johnson Cover Image
$19.99
Backordered Title, Not on our shelves: Call to check availability.
ISBN: 9780814346655
Published: Wayne State University Press - June 3rd, 2019

Meditations on life and death from the shores of Lake Superior to the North Sea.


May Is an Island By Jonathan Johnson Cover Image
$15.95
Backordered Title, Not on our shelves: Call to check availability.
ISBN: 9780887486371
Published: Carnegie Mellon University Press - October 30th, 2018

If the dead are a sea and the living an island, these poems speak from the shore. Their steady company consoles and reminds us that the wages of mortal awareness and sorrow endured can be attention and generosity.


Hannah and the Mountain: Notes toward a Wilderness Fatherhood (American Lives ) By Jonathan Johnson Cover Image
$24.95
ISBN: 9780803226012
Availability: On Our Shelves Now
Published: University of Nebraska Press - March 1st, 2005

Longing for a home in big, wild country that would keep them passionate and young, Jonathan Johnson and his wife, Amy, set out to build a log cabin on his family’s land in a remote and beautiful corner of Idaho.