Upcoming Events: Where You Can Find Us
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STORIES ON SUNDAY: Paul Rousseau (Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir)
September 8 @ 7:00 pm - 8:15 pm EDT
Note: if you’re reading this on mobile, the full ticket instructions might not be showing in the ticket box above; to register, add your chosen dollar amount and number of tickets using the + sign. (For a free ticket, simply put in $0.) Ticket includes live event and access to recording.
Enjoy a reading, then hear the story behind the stories during Stories on Sunday with author Paul Rousseau.
All Stories on Sunday guest readers have a connection to Hippocampus Magazine. A past contributor, Paul received a Pushcart Prize nomination for the essay “Curiously Colored & Timely Animals + Other Things Forgotten Post Brain Surgery” which appeared in our May-June 2021 issue.
About the Book: One month before his college graduation, Paul Rousseau is accidentally shot in the head by his roommate and best friend.
At some point in the course of Paul and Mark’s friendship, Mark acquired — legally and with required permits — five firearms. Those weapons lived with them in their college apartment. It was a non-issue for the two best friends. They were inseparable. They were twenty-two-year-old boys at the height of their college experience, unaware that everything was about to change forever.
The bullet ripped through two walls before it struck Paul’s skull. Mark had accidentally pulled the trigger while in the other room and — frightened for his own future — delayed getting treatment for Paul, who miraculously remained conscious the entire time. In vivid detail, Friendly Fire brings us into the world of both the shooting itself and its surgical counterpoint — the dark spaces of survival in the face of a traumatic brain injury and into the paranoid, isolating, dehumanizing maw of personal injury cases.
Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir is the story of a friendship — both its formation and its destruction. Through phenomenal writing and gripping detail, Paul reveals a compelling and inspirational story that speaks to much of contemporary American life.
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.
Paul Rousseau is a Disabled writer. His debut, Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir is forthcoming from HarperCollins September 10, 2024. Paul’s writing has also appeared in Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, Catapult, Hippocampus, Wigleaf, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. You can read his work online at Paul-Rousseau.com and follow him on Twitter @Paulwrites7.