Stevenson and Reeve, who are married and reside in Wilmington, each have published new works recently. For Stevenson, “Return in Kind’’(Separate Star Publishing) is her fifth novel and the first one not specifically written for young adult audiences; while Reeve’s “The Puzzle Master and Other Poems’’ (New York Quarterly Press) is his 10th collection of poems in print. The Book Cellar will have copies of both available for sale at the museum during the reading.
“Return in Kind’’ tells the story of Joel Hendrickson, whose wife Letty has passed away and left him 150 acres in Vermont that he didn’t know she owned. Joel goes to Vermont to sell the property and discovers not a ski-country investment but the Ward Place: an old farm with a family graveyard and a house that is mysteriously clean and well-kept, in spite of having been empty since 1959. What emerges is a tale of romance, misplaced pride, and unendurable sorrow, as Joel struggles to discover whether his legacy was a reproach, an apology, or a twisted but genuine act of love.
On her blog, book critic of “Return in Kind” Beth Kanell says, “Stevenson’s exploration of this landscape of hunger and heart is serenely paced and underlaid with a foundation of wisdom. In baring the framework built of loss and small acts of courage, Stevenson reveals how kindness and larger acts of courage take form in the soul and in community.”
Editor Robert Giroux has called Reeve “one of America’s most gifted and individual poets.” For nearly 50 years, he has found in nature both a refuge from human imperfection and an exquisite rejoinder to it. Whether that imperfection be the war in Afghanistan, worsening economic inequality or even the ridiculous pretense of a thoroughly professionalized poetry, Reeve makes of aesthetic perception a kind of subjunctive faith in “The Puzzle Master and Other Poems.’’ For a moment one man’s skill offers the possibility of redemption, and the alternatives behind experience bloom like those fragile violets in a pewter vase. With its elegant short lyrics and long dramatic poem, which reworks the Daedalus-Icarus myth by situating it on a Caribbean island and serves as the text for a jazz opera.
Stevenson has been a professor of writing and literature at Marlboro College since 1986. Her first book, “Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature, 1558-1603,’’ began as her doctoral dissertation at Yale and was completed during her time as an Andrew W. Mellon Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Harvard University. When escalating deafness (recently partially reversed with a cochlear implant) compelled her to give up her avocation as a musician, she began writing stories for her children. Since then she has published four children’s novels – “Happily After All” (1990), “The Island and the Ring’’ (1991), “All the King’s Horses’’ (2001), and “A Castle in the Window’’ (2003) – and collaborated on shorter works with Marlboro student illustrators. An NEH Research Fellowship in 1996-97 has resulted in several critical studies of late 19th century children’s literature.
Reeve is the recipient of the New England Poetry Club’s Golden Rose Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
In addition to 10 collections of poetry, he has published fiction and literary criticism in literary journals across the country, including the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post’s Book World.
Reeve learned Russian and spent a year in Moscow and Leningrad as an exchange professor between the ACLS and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. After teaching in Columbia’s Slavic Department and Wesleyan’s Russian Department, he became a Professor of Letters at Wesleyan, from which he retired after a total of 50 years of academic service.
For more information contact the Marlboro College public relations department at (802) 251-7644 or pr@marlboro.edu.
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