GETTING OUT

Hoodsport author Rebecca Holbrook will read from her debut novel "Omie's Well," and writer Melanie Jennings - the current writer-in-residence at Hypatia-in-the-Woods - will read essays from her work in progress, "Cake," at 2 p.m. Jan. 7 at the Shelton Timberland Library.

Admission is free to the event at 710 W. Alder St. Holbrook will also play some of her compositions on banjo.

Rebecca Holbrook

Holbrook grew up in the South, where her maternal line went back to some of the earliest settlers around Savannah, Georgia. Stories from her ancestors, passed down through the generations, inspired the novel. Though she grew up in Florida and lived much of her life in Tennessee, those family tales are loosely draped around her own story.

In "Omie's Well," Omie Silar and her mamma Kate are descended from a line of women possessing the Sight - a knowing of things to come, of secrets hidden beneath life's surface. Midwives and healers, they used their gifts to lessen the suffering of those living and those hovering between. Had Omie been able to read the portents at the bottom of her own teacup, she might have borne less suffering herself. Perhaps when she saw, as her mother predicted, the face of the man she was to marry, she only sensed the sweetness that overlaid the sorrows to come.

The book is available on Kindle.

Holbrook, who lives in Hoodsport with her husband Gary, is writing the sequel, "The Deer Stone." She has also played the banjo and written songs for most of her life.

Melanie Jennings

Jennings, who lives on the Oregon coast, is spending her writing residency at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in rural Mason County writing personal essays for her book. Born and raised in the San Francisco area, Jennings is primarily a novelist who writes weird family dramedies that "fall somewhere between Margaret Atwood and Jane Austen," she stated in a news release. According to the release, she's "interested in evangelicalism, tourism, dudes, queers and the mythic American West."

Jennings' short stories, poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in several literary magazines, and her freelance work in Willamette Week, Portland Food and Drink and Writer's Monthly." She earned her doctorate degree in literature from the University of California San Diego, where she wrote a dissertation about "The Grapes of Wrath" and her Dust Bowl Okie heritage.