On Sunday, July 20 from 2:00 pm-3:00pm, please join us for a special afternoon at the Middletown Senior Center with authors Linda Murphy Marshall and Rhonda Zimlich. Linda and Rhonda will discuss their novels Immersion and Raising Panic, focusing on the protagonists’ journeys of self-discovery. After their talk, the authors will answer questions and sign books. Copies of Immersion and Raising Panic will be available for purchase at the event.
Location: Middletown Senior Center – 101 Prospect St, Middletown, MD 21769
This event is free and open to the public. For accessibility requests, email info@curiousiguana.com at least two (2) weeks prior to the event.
About Linda Murphy Marshall: Linda Murphy Marshall has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Languages and Literature and an MA in Spanish from St. Louis University, where she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, and she earned an MFA in Creative Writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts. In addition, she worked as a multi-linguist for the government for nearly 30 years, studying and working in more than a dozen languages. For five years she worked as a Senior Research Scientist at the University of Maryland’s Center for Advanced Study of Language/CASL, a language think tank, specializing in African languages. Her 2022 memoir, Ivy Lodge: A Memoir of Translation and Discovery received a starred review from Kirkus. Her award-winning second memoir, Immersion: A Linguist’s Memoir, was published in 2024. She is an Associate for the National Museum of Language and a docent at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Her essays have appeared in more than two dozen publications, including the Los Angeles Review, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Catamaran Literary Reader, Maryland Literary Review, Brevity’s Nonfiction Blog, and elsewhere. https://lindamurphymarshall.com
About Immersion: Immersion is a memoir that takes the reader on a captivating emotional and physical journey through Linda Murphy Marshall’s life: from the longstanding, crippling impact of family members’ low expectations and abuse, to her discovery as a young adult that she possesses special skills in foreign languages.
Linda is taught from an early age that she has little of value to offer the world. But her love of and affinity for languages enables her to create a new life—to separate herself from her toxic environment and to build a successful, decades-long career as a professional multilinguist. It’s a rewarding vocation, but a challenging one: her assignments with the US federal government take her on some hair-raisingly dangerous journeys, some to countries with unstable governments and even active war zones. But these sometimes-harrowing experiences teach her how to open the “windows” around her, unearth her true self, and develop a healthy sense of self-worth—and ultimately, paradoxically, her work and travel so far from home allow her to come home to herself.
About Rhonda Zimlich: Rhonda Zimlich is the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at American University in Washington, DC. Her debut novel, Raising Panic, won the 2023 Book Award from Steel Toe Books. Her writing focuses on history, grief, and intergenerational trauma, with an occasional ghost story. She is also the recipient of the 2024 Nonfiction award from Barely South Review, the 2021 Mental Health Awareness Contest for Fiction from Please See Me, the 2020 Literary Award in Nonfiction from Dogwood Journal at Fairfield University (that same essay earned her an honorable mention in America’s Best Essays, 2021). Additional work has appeared in Brevity, American Story Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, Chestnut Review, and more. More at www.rhondazimlich.com
About Raising Panic: Set in 1978, a time of Ditto jeans and rabbit’s foot keychains, Raising Panic captures the bond of sisters struggling to find security in an alcoholic home and their attempt to escape. PJ McCormack wants nothing more than to leave her rural valley and alcoholic mother, the way her father did years earlier. But she cannot leave behind her nine-year-old sister, Panic. Instead, she teaches Panic about survival, hoping to prepare her to someday leave. After Panic witnesses the historic PSA 182 jetliner crash (the first televised mass-casualty event in the U.S.), the family is thrown into crisis, solidifying the sisters’ plan to leave. As their situation spins out of control, they’ll learn the reason behind their father’s disappearance, the source of rabbit’s foot keychains, and the origin of Panic’s name.
