The LSA Honors Program is delighted to welcome to campus scholar and novelist, Linda Rui Feng, Ph.D, for a reading and in-conversation in support of her stunning debut, Swimming Back To Trout River!
After a brief reading, Linda will be joined in conversation with LSA Honors Program Director, Miranda Brown, Ph.D, for a wide-ranging conversation. Some of the topics they will discuss include: writing as the means to access and widen those subjects one is unfamiliar with, the spectrum of the diasporic experience as it relates to both language and time, and what it means to discover and trust one’s writerly process.
There will be an audience Q&A after the in-conversation. Literati Bookstore will be on-site to facilitate a book signing following the conclusion of the event. We look forward to seeing you there!
About the book:
How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves?
Swimming Back to Trout River traces the far-flung orbits of a family across two continents, and explores the themes of music and migration in the aftermath of one of China’s most tumultuous eras in the twentieth century.
In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village where she lives with her grandparents, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.
Junie doesn’t know that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. For Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three family members before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.
Swimming Back to Trout River is a “symphony of a novel” (BookPage) that reveals the hopes, compromises, and abiding ingenuity that make up the lives of immigrants. It “weaves a plot both surprising and inevitable, with not a word to spare” (Booklist, starred review).
Linda Rui Feng, Ph.D, is both a practitioner and researcher of imaginative storytelling. At the University of Toronto, her work in Chinese cultural history takes her to narratives from the ninth century and, more recently, to the history of scent and aromatics. She is the author of City of Marvel and Transformation: Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China, and the 2021 novel, Swimming Back to Trout River. The last time she spent a significant chunk of time in Ann Arbor was during her undergrad years, when she had a summer research internship in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering and lived in a co-op in North Campus. (She is still trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.)
Miranda Brown, Ph.D, is a cultural historian of China, whose primary interests lie in recipes of all kinds, with a special interest in culinary and medical recipes. Dr. Brown has published numerous articles on various aspects of Chinese medical, culinary, and cultural history in English and Chinese. Dr. Brown is also the author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China (2007) and, with the late Conrad Schirokauer, the co-author of A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (2012). Presently, Dr. Brown is working on a nonfiction trade book, to be published by St. Martin’s Press, titled Dumpling Therapy.
After a brief reading, Linda will be joined in conversation with LSA Honors Program Director, Miranda Brown, Ph.D, for a wide-ranging conversation. Some of the topics they will discuss include: writing as the means to access and widen those subjects one is unfamiliar with, the spectrum of the diasporic experience as it relates to both language and time, and what it means to discover and trust one’s writerly process.
There will be an audience Q&A after the in-conversation. Literati Bookstore will be on-site to facilitate a book signing following the conclusion of the event. We look forward to seeing you there!
About the book:
How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves?
Swimming Back to Trout River traces the far-flung orbits of a family across two continents, and explores the themes of music and migration in the aftermath of one of China’s most tumultuous eras in the twentieth century.
In the summer of 1986, in a small Chinese village where she lives with her grandparents, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s growing determination to stay put in the idyllic countryside with her beloved grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.
Junie doesn’t know that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country. While Momo grapples anew with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. For Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three family members before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.
Swimming Back to Trout River is a “symphony of a novel” (BookPage) that reveals the hopes, compromises, and abiding ingenuity that make up the lives of immigrants. It “weaves a plot both surprising and inevitable, with not a word to spare” (Booklist, starred review).
Linda Rui Feng, Ph.D, is both a practitioner and researcher of imaginative storytelling. At the University of Toronto, her work in Chinese cultural history takes her to narratives from the ninth century and, more recently, to the history of scent and aromatics. She is the author of City of Marvel and Transformation: Chang’an and Narratives of Experience in Tang Dynasty China, and the 2021 novel, Swimming Back to Trout River. The last time she spent a significant chunk of time in Ann Arbor was during her undergrad years, when she had a summer research internship in the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering and lived in a co-op in North Campus. (She is still trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up.)
Miranda Brown, Ph.D, is a cultural historian of China, whose primary interests lie in recipes of all kinds, with a special interest in culinary and medical recipes. Dr. Brown has published numerous articles on various aspects of Chinese medical, culinary, and cultural history in English and Chinese. Dr. Brown is also the author of The Politics of Mourning in Early China (2007) and, with the late Conrad Schirokauer, the co-author of A Brief History of Chinese Civilization (2012). Presently, Dr. Brown is working on a nonfiction trade book, to be published by St. Martin’s Press, titled Dumpling Therapy.
| Building: | Mason Hall |
|---|---|
| Website: | |
| Event Type: | Lecture / Discussion |
| Tags: | #Honors Program, Books, Chinese Studies, Creative Writing, History, honors, Honors Program, Humanities, Interdisciplinary, Literature, Music, Storytelling |
| Source: | Happening @ Michigan from LSA Honors Program, Medieval and Early Modern Studies (MEMS) |
