Maine writer Monica Wood to read

Maine writer Monica Wood will read from her recent works at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 7, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, 70 Campus Ave. The reading is free and open to the public.

Wood, born in Mexico, Maine, is a widely published and frequently anthologized writer of short stories. Her recent story Ernie’s Ark won a 1999 Pushcart prize. She has also published two novels, The Secret Language (1993) and My Only Story (Chronicle Books, 2000). Of her most recent book My Only Story, The San Francisco Chronicle said: “Wood’s command of voice holds a reader all the way through to the last page, where — as after a good haircut — she holds up a mirror and encourages us to recognize ourselves.”

Wood said of her own work: “If I have any obsession as a writer, it is the notion of the power of our ‘first’ family, that collection of people who accompanied us, for better or worse, through the process of learning how to find our way into the world. Our first family remains with us, in ways both damaging and redeeming, through our entire lives. It is this family that must be alternately escaped from and returned to, over and over, in the family dance.”