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Solomon Plains supports Anti Bullying Month

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Happy anniversary to Mr. & Mrs. Adam Bonk!

<p>WILKES-BARRE &#8212; Ponder the careworn face of Florence Owens Thompson and what do you see?</p><p>She&#8217;s exhausted, surely, and discouraged. She&#8217;s worried about her children as she struggles to feed them on a migrant worker&#8217;s meager wages.</p><p>Her car? If she has one, it&#8217;s probably broken down. Her location? She may have arrived at a pea-pickers&#8217; camp just in time to learn freezing rain had wiped out the crop so there would be no work and no money.</p><p>The longer you gaze into her sad eyes or wonder if she has enough milk for the baby at her breast, the more you wonder about the circumstances of the woman who encountered photographer Dorothea Lange in 1936 and became &#8220;Migrant Mother,&#8221; a symbol of the Great Depression.</p><p>Award-winning author Marisa Silver, who is scheduled to give a public reading from her works on Nov. 9 at King&#8217;s College, looked at that photo and found enough inspiration for her 2013 best-selling novel, &#8220;Mary Coin.&#8221;</p><p>If you&#8217;ve read &#8220;Mary Coin&#8221; or some of Silver&#8217;s other work, such as &#8220;The God of War&#8221; or &#8220;No Direction Home&#8221; you&#8217;ll notice her knack for writing about the ways people deal with some heavy issues &#8212; from poverty and abandonment to a degenerative eye disease or a developmentally disabled younger brother.</p><p>&#8220;I&#8217;m not attracted to hardship per se,&#8221; Silver said during a telephone interview, &#8220;but people&#8217;s natures are often thrown into high relief when they find themselves in times that are challenging.&#8221;</p><p>The idea for &#8220;Mary Coin&#8221; took a while to develop, Silver said. &#8220;What drove me to write the story was, she (Florence Owens Thompson) had never revealed who she was in public until she was very sick and at the end of her life and needed money for health care. She did declare herself when her life was in a very critical situation. That made me think about what had been her reaction to that photograph. To have your life encapsulated into a single image; she might have had a very conflicted reaction to that.&#8221;</p><p>Early in &#8220;Mary Coin,&#8221; Silver introduces a historical researcher named Walker Dodge who will look into the lives of Mary Coin and photographer Vera Dare.</p><p>Dodge wants to know the details of people&#8217;s lives, right down to how they washed their clothes, and Silver admits she shares that trait. &#8220;Like him, I&#8217;m someone who likes to troll through boxes of old photographs and thrift shops.&#8221;</p><p>Naturally, she crafted lots of details for Dodge&#8217;s life, even his memories of being a lackluster teen-age athlete: &#8220;the dropped relay baton, the single basket scored after the final buzzer &#8212; high school shames he buried with a biting and sarcastic intelligence and a studied apathy that enraged his father.&#8221;</p><p>Silver, who has won the prestigious O. Henry Award for her writing, made her fiction debut in &#8220;The New Yorker&#8221; when she was featured in the magazine&#8217;s first &#8220;Debut Fiction&#8221; issue. Her collection of short stories, &#8220;Babe in Paradise,&#8221; was named a &#8220;New York Times&#8221; Notable Book of the Year and was a &#8220;Los Angeles Times&#8221; Best Book of the Year.</p><p>Prior to her work as a novelist, Silver directed her first film, &#8220;Old Enough,&#8221; which captured the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984. She also directed the feature films &#8220;Permanent Record&#8221; (1988), with Keanu Reeves, &#8220;Vital Signs&#8221; (1990) and &#8220;He Said, She Said&#8221; (1991) with Kevin Bacon and Elizabeth Perkins.</p><p>In addition to the public reading at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 9 in King&#8217;s College&#8217;s Burke Auditorium, Silver will advise English students on their creative writing as part of a two-day campus residency.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Author Marisa Silver will speak at King&#8217;s College. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/web1_marisa.silver.jpg</photo0><caption0>Author Marisa Silver will speak at King&#8217;s College. </caption0><photoCredit0>Submitted photos </photoCredit0></div><div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/web1_mary.coin_.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">Marisa Silver&#8217;s novel &#8216;Mary Coin&#8217; became a New York Times bestseller. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo1>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/web1_mary.coin_.jpg</photo1><caption1>Marisa Silver&#8217;s novel &#8216;Mary Coin&#8217; became a New York Times bestseller. </caption1><photoCredit1>Submitted photos </photoCredit1></div><div class="neFile"><img class="neImage" src="https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/web1_migrant.mother.jpg">
<div class="neCaption">This famous photograph by Dorothea Lange came to epitomize the hardships of the Great Depression. </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo2>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/web1_migrant.mother.jpg</photo2><caption2>This famous photograph by Dorothea Lange came to epitomize the hardships of the Great Depression. </caption2><photoCredit2>Library of Congress </photoCredit2></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p><strong>By Mary Therese Biebel</strong></p><p>mbiebel@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><factboxMeta><p><strong>IF YOU GO</strong></p><p><strong>Who:</strong> Author Marisa Silver</p><p><strong>What:</strong> Public reading from her work</p><p><strong>When:</strong> 7:30 p.m Nov. 9</p><p><strong>Where:</strong> Burke Auditorium, King&#8217;s College, North River St., Wilkes-Barre</p><p><strong>Admission:</strong> Free</p></factboxMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Mary Therese Biebel at 570-991-6109 or on Twitter @BiebelMT</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Award-winning writer Marisa Silver to speak at King’s College