Mandi Fugate Sheffel will visit City Lights on Saturday, October 25th at 3:00pm to share her memoir, THE NATURE OF PAIN: Roots, Recovery, and Redemption amid the Opioid Crisis, in conversation with Ronni Lundy.
"One by one, the mourners came to me. I didn't want to talk. I didn't want to discuss what might have happened. I didn't want to be here. The lump in my throat was suffocating. I'm not meant to grieve like this... I wanted to go somewhere without all these eyes. Pain is easier to digest in solitude."
Mandi Fugate Sheffel was born in the heart of rural small-town America, in a place where "wild teaberry grows," with creeks "as clear and cold as nature would allow." As a curious, sensitive child raised in a challenging environment, she formed a deep bond with her cousin Eric. As the pair grew up together, they sought a sense of belonging, and drugs and alcohol provided a temporary escape from the harsh realities of their lives. Everything shifted when Purdue Pharma launched aggressive marketing campaigns for Oxyc**tin in central Appalachia.
In The Nature of Pain, Sheffel recounts coming of age during the opioid epidemic of the late 1990s and early 2000s. She illuminates the importance of kinship and connection to place while exposing the bitter truths of a community transformed by opioids. With candid, lyrical prose, Sheffel reveals what life is really like for people in active addiction and recovery. Her lived experience as an eastern Kentuckian affected by the opioid crisis is an underrepresented story that must be heard. Sheffel's memoir is an aching tale of empathy for modern mountain folks—of love and grief, of family and place, and of the addictions that continue to pain them.
Mandi Fugate Sheffel was born and raised in Redfox, Kentucky. She is the owner of the Read Spotted Newt, an independent bookstore in Hazard, Kentucky, and has been involved with the Foundation for Appalachian Kentucky and the Appalachian Arts Alliance, among other organizations. Her personal essays and opinion pieces can be found in Still: The Journal, Appalachian Journal, The Lexington Herald-Leader, and The Courier Journal.
Ronni Lundy, the award-winning author of Victuals: An Appalachian Journey, with Recipes (Clarkson Potter, 2016), has been writing about the food, music and culture of the southern Appalachians and the American South for more than 30 years. Born in Corbin, Kentucky and raised in Louisville with strong ties to the mountains, she often writes from the perspective and about the experience of the Appalachian diaspora.
In 2017, Victuals, received the coveted James Beard Award for Book of the Year, as well as best American Cookbook honors from both the Beards and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. The book was also shortlisted for The Art of Eating Prize and reached the Elite Eight in the annual Piglet competition. Ronni’s other nine books, include Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes and Honest Fried Chicken(Atlantic, 1990), named by Gourmet as one of the six essential cookbooks on Southern food, Butter Beans to Blackberries (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) and Sorghum’s Savor, (University Press of Florida, 2015). Lundy was also the editor of Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South. (University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
You may also like the following events from City Lights Bookstore:
- Next Saturday, 1st November, 03:00 pm, Henry T. Ireys & Priscilla M. Ireys - The Keep: Living with the Tame and the Wild on a Mountain Farm in Sylva
- Next month, 8th November, 03:00 pm, Denise Cline presents her debut novel, THE RESETTLEMENT OF VESTA BLONIK in Sylva
- Next month, 13th November, 06:00 pm, Thomas Rain Crowe & Simone Lipscomb present New Natives in Sylva
Also check out other
Arts events in Sylva,
Literary Art events in Sylva.
