Dao Strom

Author Dao Strom reads from her latest short stories The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys and sings songs from her album Send Me Home. http://www.daostrom.com
Date and time: Saturday, April 7, 2007 - 2:00-3:30 pm
Location: King Library, 150 E. San Fernando St., San Jose CA 95112 - Room 255/257

An excerpt from The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys:

… Almost always in her mind’s eye she sees him standing still, or she sees him about to move, or moving slowly. He had always seemed remarkably still and slow but deliberate--economical. As if this economy of movement signaled that he was saving up for some larger, grander endeavor sometime in his future. The way his eyes shifted to meet hers that first time in the dorm hallway has played back over and over in her mind's eye. She sees him standing at the end of sidewalks in spots on campus, waiting, looking remotely in her direction. She sees him walking over the rise of a hill in a memory that is not a memory of anything she actually witnessed. When she looks into campfires now she feels a looming sadness, at the back of which something like the ghost of her knowledge of him still walks about. Another vision involves looking at the moon with him somewhere quiet, desert like, and surreal: a dark blue night, a luminous white earth, a place they have never in this life gone to. The thought of ever meeting him again (of being able to live a life actually loving him) involves, inexplicably, a vision of lying curled together on a hillside, like sleeping goats, refusing to ever get up or go back into town.
What is this town? What does the hillside mean? There is still no explaining it for her. Time, she thinks, is unrelenting…”