Upcoming Events: Where You Can Find Us
Here’s a look at our upcoming online events, plus third-party event where you can find our authors and editors! [You may also view past events by using the month view and scrolling back.]
- This event has passed.
STORIES ON SUNDAY: Paul Crenshaw & Melt With Me: Coming of Age and Other 80s Perils
February 25 @ 6:00 pm - 7:15 pm EST
See below for pricing
Join us for an evening of conversation and creative nonfiction with essayist Paul Crenshaw, who will read from his new collection Melt With Me: Coming of Age and Other ’80s Perils. (October 2023; Ohio State University Press)
About the Book: At the intersection of 1980s pop culture, the Cold War, and the trials of coming of age sits Melt with Me. Paul Crenshaw takes up a range of topics from Star Wars to video games, Choose Your Own Adventure books to the Satanic Panic. Blending the personal with the historical, levity with gravity, Crenshaw shows how pop culture shaped those who grew up in 1980s America: how Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative drove fears of nuclear war, how professional wrestling taught us everyone was either a good guy or a bad guy, how Bugs Bunny cartoons reflected the absurdity of war and mutually assured destruction, and how video games taught young boys, in particular, that no matter how hard they tried to save it, the world would end itself.
Reflecting on the decade and its dark influence on fear-based notions of nation and manhood, Crenshaw writes, “All this reminds me I’m still afraid of the same things I was afraid of as a child. Some days I think the movies are real and we’re watching the last hour of humanity. You’ll have to decide if there’s any hope.”
About the Series: Stories on Sundays are bi-monthly readings from a recent/forthcoming work of creative nonfiction followed by an author interview + audience Q&A. Your registration helps fund our contributor payments and other costs associated with running our journal.
All of our readers have a connection to Hippocampus Magazine, and we’re proud to have published several of Paul Crenshaw’s pieces over the years. In addition to this new collection, Paul is the author of This One Will Hurt You and This We’ll Defend, on the Cold War culture of the 1980s. Other work has appeared in Best American Essays, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Pushcart Prize, and Oxford American.
