Please join us with former Iowa Citian, Kathy Taylor, who will read from her novel, The Birthing House. This literary historical novel follows a woman’s journey of healing and discovery through her writing. It features explorations of heart, mind, and body, richly textured with friendships, memories, dreams, and layers of history. Two timelines alternate, twenty years apart.  Synopsis: In 1980, after a recent miscarriage, Clare Muller arrives in the fairytale town of Marburg, Germany with her husband and six-year-old son. She faces the adventures and challenges of living in a different language and culture and eventually with a new pregnancy. In 2000, she and her husband return as mid-career professors, following the sudden death of Clare’s beloved father. They live in a house that had once belonged to a midwife and had been the birthing house for many in the surrounding area. As the house releases the years of stories embedded in its walls, it becomes a home for Clare and a catalyst for her writing. Her grief fades, her world expands and a book is born. This novel grew out of the author’s experience living in Marburg in the early 1980’s and again in 2001. It is in part a love story to this medieval town and its role in Germany’s moving from the trauma of the Nazi years to becoming a haven of diversity for immigrants, refugees, and the blind from around the world.

Kathy Taylor is is a writer and musician and a retired professor of Spanish (literature, linguistics, and creative writing). A passionate polyglot, she loves languages and their cultures and is fascinated by language in general. She has lived in Mexico, Nicaragua, Ireland, Curaçao and Germany, and has written and published in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Papiamentu: songs, poetry, short stories, essays, translations, a bilingual ethnographic novel on Mexican taxi drivers, and literary and linguistic theory. She is the author of a previous short story collection called Trees and Other Witnesses.  She and her husband reside off the grid in the majestic mountains of Colorado, drawing inspiration from the breathtaking landscapes surrounding them.