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About
The King's English is hosting authors Brenda Miller and Joel Long for their new books, Love You, Bye, and Watershed. Tickets for this event are $5; all proceeds go directly to our partner non-profit, Brain Food Books.
Practical details:
- Copies of the books will be available to purchase at the event.
- You may pre-order a signed copy to be picked up at the event by calling the store at 801-484-9100 or ordering online.
- If you cannot make the event, signed copies may be ordered from our website.
- Places in the signing line are reserved for those who purchase a copy from The King's English.
About Love You, Bye:
A luminous collection of essays and poems about family, faith, and the art of saying goodbye from award-winning essayist, poet, and teacher Brenda Miller.
In Love You, Bye, Brenda Miller maps the territory of caregiving, loss, and unexpected grace. The title—drawn from the simple phrase she and her mother said to each other for years—captures the bittersweet essence of a book that finds profound meaning in ordinary expressions of love.
From the rituals of Passover to the silence of hospice rooms, from the mysterious appearances of tree frogs to the sacred work of singing at deathbeds, Miller weaves together the ordinary and the transcendent. At the center of this collection lies Miller's journey as the "wayward daughter" who becomes the devoted caregiver to her aging parents, chronicling her father's gradual decline and her mother's final months with remarkable vulnerability.
Miller's voice moves between prose and poetry, humor and heartbreak, the personal and the universal. She transforms the simple act of saying goodbye into an art form and the everyday language of love into something approaching prayer. Essential reading for anyone navigating the complexities of aging parents, the mysteries of faith, or the simple courage required to keep loving in a world that can break our hearts.
About Watershed:
Watershed is a collection of essays focused on the Great Salt Lake—its beauty, its fragility, and its changing landscape in the face of climate change. Water serves as a symbol and a reassurance throughout the first essay. Alongside the water, the essays pay attention to the life around the lake—the birds, the microbes, even the hope we can draw from mud.
Though focused on a specific landscape, these essays also reveal the narrator and their life. The writing is intimate and thoughtful: it speaks of the place as it is—its beauty, its struggle, its ugliness—and uses questions to prompt readers to consider the landscapes they call home. These essays tell stories of the place penetrating the author’s life in its sublimity and its grief; the Salt Lake Valley, the wetlands, the lake, and the surrounding canyons are deeply ingrained in the personal, and the personal is inextricable from the land.