Peachtree City Library will welcome author Chad Davidson at Line Creek Brewing on Thursday, February 22, at 7 p.m. Davidson will talk about his most recent book, Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year (LSU Press, 2024). The book talk is free and open to the public.
The essays in Davidson’s Bring Out Your Dead: Elegies from the Plague Year mainly concern the loss of the author’s father directly before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which the pandemic itself provided a strangely ideal backdrop to grieving. Refracted through the kaleidoscopic, yet strangely stagnant, isolation period in the first year of COVID, his father’s death—another plague visited on the author—found its way into all his waking hours, coloring whatever he tried to write, particularly when he tried not to let it. Friends both lost and nearly so, the burning of Notre Dame in Paris, even the seemingly inconsequential discovery of a rash of chew toys in the yard: these events assumed an unmistakable gravity, considered in the midst of a pandemic and the ruins of personal grief.
Bring Out Your Dead adds Davidson’s father to the growing list of loved ones lost in—and, in this case, right before—the pandemic. It’s a personal memorial, given over to a father’s memory and the grief endured while living through dueling plagues (one viral, the other psychological). In the end, the book becomes more about the ways we eulogize, how we remember those who are gone, why their memories persist, and what summons them back into our thoughts, our language, and our lives.
Davidson is the author of four collections of poems and two memoirs. He directs the School of the Arts at the University of West Georgia and co-directs Convivio, a summer arts and literary conference in Postignano, Italy.
Line Creek Brewing Co.’s limited release 30269 American Light Lager, a joint project with the Peachtree City Convention & Visitors Bureau, will be available for purchase at the event. The cans feature a fun logo sure to delight city residents.
On-site book sales will be handled by Hills & Hamlets Bookshop of Serenbe.
