Gallery of Readers presents Norma Sims Roche and Rich McKeown reading from their work.
Sunday, February 11, 2024, at 4 PM
Florence Civic Center
90 Park Street, Florence, MA
(next door to Lilly Library)
Free and open to the public. Please come join us, all are welcome!
For those who can’t or prefer not to attend in person, a Zoom session will be available from 3.45 p.m. EDT on the day of the reading. (Be aware no admittance to the Zoom session after 4:05 p.m. for security purposes). Contact Robin or Carol — or one of the readers — for secure access to the zoom link.
Norma Sims Roche
Norma Sims Roche grew up on Cape Cod, but has lived in Northampton since graduating from UMass in 1977. She recently retired from her work as an editor of college textbooks on biology and geology, through which she learned many amazing things about our planet, and even remembers a few of them. She is grateful to all the attendees at Robin Barber’s Wednesday workshop, who have told her wonderful stories and kept her writing over the last 15 years. She writes mainly memoir, personal essays, poems, and fiction based on true events. She will paddle into her retirement years keeping the advice of her whitewater kayaking instructors in mind: “Keep your hips relaxed, lean downstream, and look where you want to go.”
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Richard McKeown
Richard McKeown is a visual artist and musician as well as a writer. He has recently retired from a long career working with people with substance use disorders. As he began to explore in writing his mixed feelings about retirement, the narrative quickly changed course when he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease. He plans to read from his memoir of Parkinson’s, tentatively called “Shoulder Season.” He lives in Southampton with his wife Carolyn, dog Jonas, and cat Max. Rich’s words to live by are, “You can never have too many guitars.” He has eleven.