Reading: Melissa Febos and Lydi Conklin
Sunday, June 8, 2025
6 PM
We are so excited to host an extraordinary evening with bestselling author and beloved FAWC Summer Workshop Instructor Melissa Febos and author Lydi Conklin, who’ll read from and discuss their new books.
Melissa’s new book, THE DRY SEASON: A Memoir of Pleasure in a Year Without Sex, is a profound examination of relationships and self-knowledge, and of the solitude, freedoms, and feminist heroes she discovered during a year of romantic abstinence. Recounting her year of celibacy, Febos delves into the complexities of independence and the surprising pleasures of living a life on one’s own terms, unmediated by romantic pursuits. Blending a candid personal account with wide-ranging cultural history, Febos challenges conventional understandings of relationships, redefines personal freedom, and invites readers to examine their own lives anew. THE DRY SEASON casts celibacy not as a lack or deprivation, but as a powerful path toward enlightenment, and toward a deepened relationship with oneself.
Febos will be joined by close friend and fellow writer Lydi Conklin, who will read from their new and wonderful debut novel, Songs of No Provenance, which tells the story of Joan Vole, an indie folk singer forever teetering on the edge of fame, who flees New York after committing a shocking sexual act onstage that she fears will doom her career. A propulsive character study of a flawed and fascinating artist, Songs of No Provenance explores issues of trans nonbinary identity, queer baiting and appropriation, kink, fame hunger, secrecy and survival, and the question of whether a work of art can exist separately from its artist.
There will be a Q&A with Melissa and Lydi following their reading. This event will start at 6:00 PM in the Stanley Kunitz Common Room at FAWC, and is free and open to the public.
Melissa Febos
is the national bestselling author of five books, including Girlhood—winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, and the forthcoming memoir The Dry Season. She has received awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, LAMBDA Literary, the Black Mountain Institute, the British Library, the Bogliasco Foundation, and others. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The Best American Essays, Vogue, and The New York Times Magazine. She is a Professor at the University of Iowa.
Lydi Conklin
has received a Stegner Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Creative Writing Fulbright in Poland, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, work-study and fellowships from MacDowell, Yaddo, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers Conference, Emory University, Hedgebrook, Djerassi, the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and elsewhere. Their fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, One Story, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and VQR. They have drawn cartoons for The New Yorker and Narrative Magazine, and graphic fiction for The Believer, Lenny Letter, and the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago. They’ve served as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan and are now an Assistant Professor of Fiction at Vanderbilt University. Their story collection, Rainbow Rainbow, was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Award and The Story Prize. Their novel, Songs of No Provenance, is forthcoming in June 2025 from Catapult in the US and Vintage in the UK.
The Fine Arts Work Center is committed to making its events and services inclusive and accessible for everyone. If you need any accommodations to fully participate, please contact our Accessibility Coordinator, Susan Blood, at 508-487-9960, extension 106.
Both the Stanley Kunitz Common Room and the Hudson D. Walker Gallery meet ADA accessibility standards. If you need help accessing these spaces, please call us at 508-487-9960 ext. 101 before your visit.
This program is supported in part by the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, Mass Cultural Council, Mass Development, and Provincetown Tourism Fund, and Provincetown Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.
