Reading and Q&A With Lynn Stegner, Author of The Half-Life of Guilt

Maker, Mentor, Muse & Alta Mesa Center for the Arts Presents:

A Reading and Q&A

With Lynn Stegner author of The Half-Life of Guilt

in conversation with R.B. Finch

Sunday, July 26th - 4pm PDT

The Half-Life of Guilt, Stegner tells the story of Clair Bugato and Mason Comstock. Together they journey to the world’s largest saltworks in Baja California, where a proposed expansion threatens the California gray whale population, recently come back from the brink of extinction.

In the midst of a conservation battle, they meet a mysterious son of Mexico, Rubio Cantú, who leads them to the powers that be. Their two-week journey sends Clair deep into the past, where she reviews the divergent paths she and her near-identical twin sister have taken away from a childhood tragedy. At the same time, Mason confronts his own unhappy past in Cornwall, England, with a father whose hate was stronger than his love.

Lynn Stegner is the author of six works of fiction. Her novels include: The Half-Life of Guilt, Because a Fire Was in My Head (which won the Faulkner Award for Best Novel and was a Literary Ventures Selection, a BookSense Pick, and a New York Times Editors’ Choice), Undertow, and Fata Morgana. Her novella triptych, Pipers at the Gates of Dawn won the Faulkner Society Gold Medal in the novella category. She has also penned a volume of short stories, For All the Obvious Reasons, written an extended critical introduction to her father-in-law’s short fiction, the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner, and edited Wallace Stegner: On Teaching and Writing Fiction (Penguin).

R. P. Finch is the author of Skin in the Game, written from the vantage point of personal perspective gained from his practice of law, although his experience with street thugs and the Mob, strip clubs and the CIA, remains shrouded in mystery. R. P. Finch received a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University and a J.D. from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, and currently is a reviewer, with an emphasis on debut novels, for Popmatters.com. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Maker, Mentor, Muse is a teaching platform founded in 2022 by Mary Volmer, Maw Shein Win, and Dawn Angelicca Barcelona. Hailing from three distinct backgrounds, generations, and spiritual traditions we believe community is essential to building a satisfying and sustainable literary life and that true success requires balancing all three artistic roles: maker, mentor, muse. In collaboration with Alta Mesa Center for the Arts, sponsored by Orinda Community Church, we are building a place where artists embrace practices that honor process, spiritual growth, connection, and ongoing community with other writers.

Art is a spiritual act and a human right.

Alta Mesa Center for the Arts is an interfaith arts and spirituality hub, housed and sponsored by Orinda Community Church. Follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube

BIG thanks to our favorite local independent bookstore: