Reception and Book Talk Featuring Marty Ross-Dolen and Her New Memoir!

Join Marty Ross-Dolen for a 6 pm reception and 7 pm author talk held to launch her memoir, Always There, Always Gone, a mother-daughter story of multigenerational trauma, grief, discovery, and love, with the backdrops of an historic American tragedy and an iconic family business, written in lyrical, fragmented form. Marty will be in conversation with novelist and memoirist Lee Martin who teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.

Registration for this free event is required. The pre-purchase of Always There, Always Gone will also be available during registration, with copies available at the event. The event will be held at Bexley Library’s auditorium.

BEXLEY PUBLIC LIBRARY, THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH AND CREATIVE WRITING PROGRAM are Gramercy’s Community Partners for this program.

In 1960, six years before Marty Ross-Dolen was born, her maternal grandparents were killed in an airline disaster involving the collision of two commercial jets over New York City. They were traveling from Columbus, Ohio, to seek placement for their family’s iconic magazine, Highlights for Children, on the newsstands. Their daughter—Marty’s mother—was fourteen years old at the time. This genre-bending memoir tells Marty’s story of being raised by a mother in protracted mourning.

The fragmented narrative explores Marty’s journey, from personal ways of coping as a child to the evolution of a mother-daughter relationship that matured over time. It is also about her longing to know her maternal grandmother, and through saved letters and photographs from her grandmother’s life, she enters a fantastical relationship that serves to replace one that otherwise could never exist. Ultimately it is about the discovery of truth, in unearthing the story of her grandparents’ deaths and her mother’s acute loss, in freeing her grandmother’s image from the weight of a tragic death, and in Marty’s own delivery from darkness. Beyond that, it is about universal life choices, the ways human beings unknowingly determine their destinies, and the healing powers of truth and love.

Marty Ross-Dolen is a graduate of Wellesley College and Albert Einstein College of Medicine and is a retired child and adolescent psychiatrist. She holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Prior to her time at VCFA, she participated in graduate-level workshops at The Ohio State University. Her essays have appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Redivider, Lilith, Willow Review, and the Brevity Blog, among others. Her essay entitled “Diphtheria” was named a notable essay in The Best American Essays series. She lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Lee Martin is the Pulitzer Prize finalist author of The Bright Forever, the upcoming The Evening Shades, and six other novels, most recently The Glassmaker’s Wife. He has also published three memoirs and two short story collections, most recently The Mutual UFO Network, in addition to the craft book, Telling Stories. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such places as Harper’s, Ms., The Best American Essays, The Best American Mystery Stories, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, among others. He is the winner of the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. A native Midwesterner, he teaches in the MFA Program at The Ohio State University.