Saturday, November 29
Reading/Book Release: Spike Gillespie and Julia Smillie
Free, 7 p.m., www.spikeg.com, www.juliacarey.com
Attendance: 25
Kids, you're in for a treat tonight, as one of our favorite expats returns to town for a one-night-only reading of her ruminations and essays. Spike Gillespie's new book — "Surrender (But Don't Give Yourself Away)" — is chock full of the significant, the mundane, the ridiculous and the often unexpectedly poignant. But she also swears a lot and is a, shall we say, somewhat unconventional person...and a whole lot of fun. Come meet her Spike-ness yourself, and you may very well find your love affair with the world renewed. As Spike concludes, "As long as a crush remains a crush, a crush offers hope. False hope = Better than no hope."
Gillespie will wax upon the topics of Secular Faith, Outrageous Hope, and the Obsessive Compulsive Creation of Christmas Cheesecakes to Ward Off Seasonal Affective Depression. She will also crack a few jokes in hopes of a smattering of groaning laughter in response (any attention is better than none).
Gillespie, who lives in Austin with her son, The Amazing Henry Mowgli, three dogs, three cats, and a one-footed bird with no name, is also the author of "All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy: A Memoir" (Simon & Schuster, 1999). She is a regular contributor to The Christian Science Monitor, a history columnist for Texas Co-Op power magazine, and a former columnist for The Dallas Morning News. Her work has also appeared in many other places including: The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, National Geographic Traveler and KIDS! magazines, The Washington Post, and Texas Monthly.
Spike will be joined by Julia Smillie (you know her from STLtoday.com's "Ask Julia" and her own witty Web site) for a round-robin reading fun fest.