Controlled Conversations: Karol Lagodzki & Agata Brewer Reading

Join us for a reading from Karol Lagodzki's debut novel, Controlled Conversations; he will be joined by Agata Izabela Brewer who will read from her memoir in essays, The Hunger Book, which was recently named on the non-fiction shortlist for the Indiana Authors Awards. Both authors' books reflect upon different aspects of life in Poland under Soviet-control, and their reading will be followed by a Q&A and signing.

About Controlled Conversations:
In 1982 Soviet-controlled Poland—a time and place of suspicion and mistrust—when geopolitical forces and violent men descend upon her little town of Zygmuntowo, Emilia must decide if she’s willing to risk prison or worse for self-respect and for her unexpected love.
A telephone station switchboard operator ordered to monitor the calls she connects, Emilia overhears a mysterious coded conversation. It continues to distract her, but not as much as the growing realization that she’s falling in unsanctioned love with her best friend Kalina. Meanwhile, outside the city of Frombork, Antek, a shipyard engineer and a Solidarity labor union treasurer, escapes from prison and works to recover the union’s money, a task which in time leads him to Emilia’s town. In the metropolitan city of Gdańsk, Roman, a secret police major, wants the money for himself and dreams of his own escape and the magical beaches of Rio de Janeiro.
As the only daughter of a local Communist Party apparatchik, Emilia has enjoyed a sheltered life, but with the advent of martial law, her mother’s influence can no longer shield her. She faces choices she never expected to make when she discovers her best friend’s and lover’s involvement with the resistance. With new allies and enemies in town, the time to choose a side is now.

About The Hunger Book:
In The Hunger Book, Agata Izabela Brewer evokes her Polish childhood under Communism, where the warmth of her grandparents’ love and the scent of mushrooms drying in a tiny apartment are as potent as the deprivations and traumas of life with a terrifyingly unstable, alcoholic single mother. Brewer indelibly renders stories of foraging for food, homemade potato vodka (one of the Eastern Bloc’s more viable currencies), blood sausage, sparrows plucked and fried with linseed oil, and the respite of a country garden plot, all amid Stalinist-era apartment buildings, food shortages, martial law, and nuclear disaster in nearby Ukraine.
Brewer reflects on all of this from her immigrant’s vantage point, as she wryly tries to convince her children to enjoy the mushrooms she gathers from a roadside and grieves when they choose to go by Americanized versions of their Polish names. Hunting mushrooms, like her childhood, carried both reward and mortal peril. The Hunger Book, which includes recipes, is an unforgettable meditation on motherhood and addiction, resilience and love.

About the authors:
Karol Lagodzki, a native of Poland, is an exophonic, English-language author of fiction. His stories have appeared in many journals, and he has won Panel Magazine’s Ruritania Prize for Short Fiction. Controlled Conversations is his debut novel. He lives halfway down an Indiana ravine with his family, including a large dog. Find him @ klagodzki.com.

Agata Izabela Brewer was born and raised in Poland. A teacher, a mother, an activist for immigrant rights, and a Court Appointed Special Advocate, she is Professor of English at Wabash College. Her creative writing has appeared in Guernica and Entropy. The Hunger Book is her first book of creative nonfiction.