Echoes of Recovery: Author Reading with Dede Montgomery, My Music Man and From First Breath to Last, Kirk Charlton, Art Inside Out, and Maura Doherty, She Blooms: Finding Home After the Convent

BOLD is honored to host Echoes of Recovery, a reading with authors Dede Montgomery, My Music Man and From First Breath to Last, Kirk Charlton, Art Inside Out, and Maura Doherty, She Blooms: Finding Home After the Convent.

Local authors will share readings from their personal journeys with recovery and sobriety. The authors will share short readings, and engage in discussions both about the writing experience and using writing as part of the healing journey. Stories include those about the authors personal recovery experience, and as a family member of parent in recovery.

Dede Montgomery is the author of From First Breath to Last: A Story About Love, Womanhood and Aging; Humanity’s Grace, Beyond the Ripples, My Music Man, and Then, Now and In-Between: Place, Memories and Loss in Oregon. Dede is also a frequent blogger about writing, well-being, compassion and synchronicity. Dede is a 6th generation Oregonian and lives near Portland, Oregon.

Kirk Charlton is an artist, educator, and author who transformed 24 years of incarceration into a mission of healing through art. He founded Art Inside Out, and uses art as a vehicle for healing and self-discovery, helping incarcerated individuals deal with stress, anxiety, low self-esteem, and addiction.

Maura Doherty was raised in the 1950s and 60s, one of seven siblings in the Bronx, New York. Her Irish-Catholic parents owned a duplex on a street teeming with kids who played games surrounded by the roar of the Cross-Bronx Expressway. The Doherty children went to parochial schools and attended Mass on Sunday. Over time, Maura became fascinated with Catholic nuns wearing habits and rosary beads and the peace they evoked.  When Maura decided to become a Sister, she never anticipated that she would leave the convent nine years later. That decision thrust her from the security of religious life into the unknown. Crafting a new future for herself, she became an activist fighting environmental pollution and toxic hazards. Her work brought her from the Bronx to Appalachia to the West Coast, where a growing dependence on alcohol threatened to rob her of all she’d achieved. Once she chose sobriety, her life opened in ways she had never imagined.

Arrive at 6:30 p.m. to grab a snack or drink. The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

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Event cohosted by BOLD Coffee & Books and Indigo: Editing, Design, and More.