Andrew Bertaina: The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place

Join us to celebrate the publication of Andrew Bertaina's collection of essays, The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place. Bertaina will be reading from his book, and will be joined by two fellow Washington, DC essayists, Timothy Denevi and Steph Liberatore.

Andrew Bertaina is going through a mid-life crisis: failed marriage, child-rearing, self-doubt, ennui, the works. Naturally, Bertaina does what any of us would do; he draws inspiration from the poster boy of mid-life crisis chroniclers, the 16th-century essayist Michele De Montaigne, channeling misgivings into meditations, lostness into longing. The essays in The Body Is a Temporary Gathering Place deal with a variety of timeless and universal topics: e.g., how to woo a French woman on a train, male caregiving, how to cannibalize your spouse, and the riddle of time. The essays promise no answers. They do, however, strive to capture the beauty that lingers in a life passing all too quickly.

About the Author:

Andrew Bertaina is the author of the forthcoming essay collection, The Body Is A Temporary Gathering Place (Autofocus Books), and the short story collection One Person Away From You (2021), which won the Moon City Short Fiction Award. His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Orion, and The Best American Poetry. His essays have been listed as notable three times in Best American Essays. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC. He is currently the Visiting Writer at American University.

About the Moderator:

Timothy Denevi is an associate professor of creative writing in the MFA program at George Mason University. His most recent book is Freak Kingdom: Hunter S. Thompson's Manic Ten-Year Crusade Against American Fascism, (2018, Hachette/PublicAffairs). He is also the author of Hyper (2014, Simon & Schuster). His essays have recently appeared in The New York Times, Salon, New York magazine, The Paris Review, Time, CNN.com, and The Atlantic. He lives near Washington, DC with his family.

About the Moderator:

Steph Liberatore is a writer and professor at George Mason University. Her essays have appeared in River Teeth, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Cream City Review, Inside Higher Ed, and elsewhere. She is also the founder & editor-in-chief of In Short: A Journal of Flash Nonfiction. When she isn’t writing or editing or chasing after her two young kids, Steph is working on her first book, an investigative memoir.