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Jazmina Barrera and Philip Hoare
May 23, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PDT
Join us for a virtual–but real!–event to celebrate the publication of Jazmina Barrera’s On Lighthouses (Two Lines Press). Jazmina will be joined by Philip Hoare for a conversation about lighthouses, the ocean, and our relationship with peril and safeguarding at the edge of the sea.
This is a benefit event for the Point Reyes National Seashore Association (PRNSA).
About On Lighthouses
Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses–those structures whose message is “first and foremost, that human beings are here.”
Starting with Robert Louis Stevenson’s grandfather, an engineer charged with illuminating the Scottish coastline, On Lighthouses artfully examines lighthouses from the Spanish to the Oregon coasts and those in the works of Virginia Woolf, Edgar Allan Poe, Ingmar Bergman, and many others.
In trying to “collect” lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone–from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one–concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.
About the conversationalists
Jazmina Barrera was born in Mexico City. She won the Latin American Voices award in 2013. She studied the Master’s in Creative Writing in Spanish at NYU. She is co-editor at Ediciones Antilope and author of On Lighthouses, to be published by Two Lines in May 2020.
Philip Hoare is the author of seven books of nonfiction, including The Sea Inside, The Whale, and biographies of Noel Coward and Stephen Tennant. He lives in Southampton and on Cape Cod.