Eve Fletcher is trying to figure out what comes next. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve is struggling to adjust to her empty nest when one night her phone lights up with a text message. Sent from an anonymous number, the mysterious sender tells Eve, "U R my MILF!" Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life—serving as Executive Director of the local senior center by day and taking a community college course on Gender and Society at night—Eve can’t curtail her own interest in a porn website called MILFateria.com, which features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve’s online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence.Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve's son Brendan—a jock and aspiring frat boy—discovers that his new campus isn’t nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night.Sharp, witty, and provocative, Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they’re no longer sure of who they are or where they belong.Tom Perrotta is the bestselling author of eight works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into critically acclaimed movies, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into an HBO series.

Fifty years ago, urban rebellions erupted in Detroit and cities across America as social movements advanced all over the world. With political debates centered on many of the same unresolved issues (race, war, policing, and civil rights), "resistance" has emerged as the keyword for today's generation of activists. Join authors Adrienne Maree Brown, Michael Hardt, and Scott Kurashige, as they analyze the structural crisis provoked by the 1960s rebellions and draw lessons from the past half-century of movement building. Highlighting the new challenges and possibilities confronting us in 2017, the authors will lead a conversation on moving from resistance to social transformation followed by a QandA.

"It's long been assumed of the region where my grandmother was born…that at some point each year the dead will come home," Inara Verzemnieks writes in this exquisite story of war, exile, and reconnection. Her grandmother's stories recalled one true home: the family farm left behind in Latvia, where, during WWII, her grandmother Livija and her grandmother's sister, Ausma, were separated. They would not see each other again for more than 50 years. Raised by her grandparents in Washington State, Inara grew up among expatriates, scattering smuggled Latvian sand over the coffins of the dead, singing folk songs about a land she had never visited.When Inara discovers the scarf Livija wore when she left home, in a box of her grandmother's belongings, this tangible remnant of the past points the way back to the remote village where her family broke apart. There it is said they suspend their exile once a year for a pilgrimage through forests and fields to the homes they left behind. Coming to know Ausma and the trauma of her exile to Siberia under Stalin, Inara pieces together Livija's survival through years as a refugee. Weaving these two parts of the family story together in spellbinding, lyrical prose, she gives us a profound and cathartic account of loss, survival, resilience, and love.Inara Verzemnieks teaches creative nonfiction at the University of Iowa. She has won a Pushcart Prize and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Award, and has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Thriving metros everywhere are struggling to make the most of available public land: parks and plazas, streets and sidewalks, shorelines and school campuses. Learn from national experts and local leaders about strategies to create more of what we love about Seattle -- outdoor space for people!Panelists:● Uwe Brandes, Executive Director, Urban and Regional Planning Program, Georgetown University● Mami Hara, General Manager/CEO, Seattle Public Utilities● Thatcher Bailey, Seattle Parks Foundation ● Moderator: KUOW's Posey Gruener

William's latest book has two parallel stories: his year alone with his dog, ground truthing backcountry maps of southern Utah, and that of his great-great-great-grandfather who in 1863 made his way with a group of Mormons from England across the ocean and the American wild almost to Utah, dying a week short.The story follows two levels of history—personal, as represented by Williams' forbear, and collective, as represented by Charles Darwin, who lived in Shrewsbury, England, at about the same time as William Williams.As Brooke Williams begins researching the story of his oldest known ancestor, he realizes he's armed with few facts. He wonders if a handful of dates can tell the story of a life, writing, "If those points were stars in the sky, we would connect them to make a constellation, which is what I’ve made with his life by creating the parts missing from his story." Thus William Williams becomes a kind of spiritual guide, a shamanlike consciousness that accompanies the author on his wilderness and life journeys, appearing at pivotal points when the author is required to choose a certain course.The mysterious presence of his ancestor inspires Williams to create imagined scenes in which his ancestor meets Darwin in Shrewsbury, sowing something central in the DNA that eventually passes to Williams, whose life has been devoted to nature and wilderness. Grounded in the present by his descriptions of the Utah lands he explores, Williams's vivid prose pushes boundaries and investigates new ways toward knowledge and experience, inviting readers to think unconventionally about how we experience reality, spirituality, and the wild.Brooke Williams has spent the last thirty years advocating for wilderness. He is the author of four books, including "Open Midnight," "Halflives: Reconciling Work and Wildness," and "The Story of My Heart," by Richard Jeffries, as rediscovered by Brooke Williams and Terry Tempest Williams. His journalistic pieces have appeared in Outside, Huffington Post, Orion, and Saltfront.

Mario Livio—an astrophysicist and author of five previous books including "Brilliant Blunders" and "The Golden Ratio"— has spent his prolific career pursuing subjects that piqued his curiosity. He’s written about mathematics, astrophysics, biology and chemistry. This year he explores the subject of curiosity itself.Livio weaves the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and evolutionary biology with the fascinating stories of epitomes of curiosity such as Leonardo da Vinci and Richard Feynman, and interviews with extraordinarily curious people at the top of their fields, including Noam Chomsky (famous linguist), Fabiola Gianotti (renowned particle physicist and passionate musician), Brian May (virtuoso guitarist for the band Queen and accomplished astrophysicist), and Marilyn vos Savant (among the world’s highest IQs and author of "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade). Curiosity is essential to literature, film, and other forms of art, from painting to sculpture to music. It is the principal driver of basic scientific research, and is what sustains a conversation that delights. The ability to ask why is uniquely human, and yet there is still no definitive scientific consensus about why that is. Mario Livio is an internationally known astrophysicist, bestselling author, and popular speaker who has appeared on The Daily Show, 60 Minutes, and NOVA. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author of "The Golden Ratio," a highly acclaimed book for which he received the International Pythagoras Prize and the Peano Prize; "The Equation That Couldn’t Be Solved"; "Is God a Mathematician?" (which was the basis for the 2016 Emmy-nominated NOVA program "The Great Math Mystery"); the national bestseller "Brilliant Blunders"; and "The Accelerating Universe."

Enjoy an exciting evening of "trading twelves" with Seattle's jazz impresarios such as Julian Priester, D'vonne Lewis and more. Doors open at 6:30 p.m.

Daniel José Older is the bestselling author of the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series and the novel Shadowshaper, which was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, the Mythopoeic Award, the International Latino Book Award, and named one of Esquire's 80 Books Every Person Should Read. He co-edited the Locus and World Fantasy nominated anthology Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History. Daniel has guest edited at Fireside Fiction, Catapult, Crossed Genres, and Fantasy Magazine, and served as a judge for the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the Burt Award for Young Adult Caribbean Literature, and the PEN American Award.From 6-7 p.m., enjoy original and DJ music by Gabriel Teodros. Teodros is one of the key artists in Seattle's hiphop scene, considered a catalyst in the surge of dynamic underground rap acts from the Pacific Northwest during the first decade of the 2000s. He is also a 2016 grad of Clarion West.

Connie Willis is an internationally-known science fiction author and the winner of an unprecedented total of eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards. She is the first author to have ever won both awards in all four fiction categories. She has also won numerous Locus Awards and was named by Locus as Best Science Fiction Author of the Nineties.Willis is the author of Doomsday Book and many other acclaimed novels, but she is probably most famous for her short stories, including "Fire Watch," "Even the Queen," and "The Last of the Winnebagos." Her novel Crosstalk was published in October 2016.Clarion West Writers Workshop is dedicated to providing high quality educational opportunities for writers of speculative fiction at the start of their careers.