NEUFELD: What can people expect if they attend the event at the Frontenac Public Library on the 14th?
PATTERSON: I'm reading with J.T. Knoll, who's from Frontenac, a Frontenac native. I interviewed J.T. for the book, and so he's going to read something, I'm not sure— he's read Sinkhole, and we've talked about Sinkhole, so I think he might try to read something that's in parallel with the book, but probably poems or prose. So he's reading and then I'll read, and then we're going to be in conversation together. And we’ll then take Q&A from the audience.
NEUFELD: So, when the book was first published three years ago, what were you sort of feeling then versus how you're feeling now with the paperback release as you sort of revisit it?
PATTERSON: Yeah, it's kind of, it's interesting. I mean, we were just chatting before we went on air, really, about the subtitle, that it was called Legacy of Suicide as a subtitle, and now it's Memoir of Loss and Land. And I actually— the death of my father is 16 years ago, 15 years ago, so I'm not grieving in that same way, right? But the book worked on me in many ways, and I am thinking a lot about place and a lot about land. One of the big things that happened in writing the book was recreating my attachment to Pittsburg, Kansas.
Both sides of my family, three generations come from that town, but my family, my parents moved to Minnesota when they got married. They’re the only people that left Kansas, and I didn't spend a lot of time in Kansas as a child, and just returning to that place, it did feel like home. I can't really explain it. I don't live there, so it isn't my home, but it feels like it's my home in my heart or something. So I think a lot about place now and what places mean to us, and especially ancestral places like that, where you had so many members of your family that spent time in a place. And I think as our culture, like, speeds up and we're all under so much pressure to produce and move around the world really fast, which I find just personally really difficult because I think I would like to move at a much slower pace, I found that, like, grounding in place is deeply, deeply important. And I think it's going to get more important to us, we'll see. Pittsburg, I'll just add, is a unique town, in that it seems to have held on to its local-ness, you know, in a really robust way. But those are the kind of things I'm thinking about now that are different.
NEUFELD: You may have just answered it a little bit, but, I know at the end of the book, you kind of felt the need to close the door on Pittsburg and your obsessive research. So how, how is that now for you? Do you still, still feel that way?
PATTERSON: That's a good question. Yes, in that, I mean, only insofar as I was digging up the history of the town and the history of my grandfathers and spending a lot of time at the genealogical library and the library and the library at the university. I haven't, you know, I regrettably haven't visited as often as I maybe would have liked. But I still have some relatives there, so, I think I've been back a couple times in the last four years, so yeah, that's definitely slowed down. Closing the door, that's a little hyperbole that one uses when creating a narrative, but I think what I meant when I said that in the book was that I had to put the obsessive research to rest, and I do feel like that has happened, yeah.
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