TICKETS $15

Doors 3:30 p.m.; Reading 4:00 p.m.; Film 4:20 p.m.
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THE EXPERIENCE

Celebrate Flannery O’Connor with this screening of Wildcat, directed by Ethan Hawke and starring his daughter Maya Hawke, who plays the celebrated Southern Gothic writer. Local author and novelist Leni Zumas will do a short reading & touch on the impact of O’Connor’s work before the film.

ON SCREEN: Wildcat

2023. Directed by Ethan Hawke. Runtime: 108 minutes. NotRated.

Directed and co-written by four-time Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke, Wildcat invites the audience to weave in and out of celebrated Southern Gothic writer Flannery O’Connor’s mind as she ponders the great questions of her writing: Can scandalous art still serve God? Does suffering precede all greatness? Can illness be a blessing? In 1950, Flannery (Maya Hawke) visits her mother Regina (Laura Linney) in Georgia, where she is diagnosed with lupus at 24 years old. Struggling with the same disease that took her father’s life when she was a child and desperate to make her mark as a great writer, this crisis pitches her imagination into a feverish exploration of belief. As she dives deeper into her craft, the lines between reality, imagination, and faith begin to blur, allowing Flannery to ultimately come to peace with her situation and heal a strained relationship with her mother.

ON STAGE: Leni Zumas

Leni Zumas is the author of three books of fiction, including the bestselling novel Red Clocks, which won the Oregon Book Award for Fiction and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and the Neukom Award for Speculative Fiction. The novel was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and was named a Best Book of 2018 by The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Huffington Post, Entropy, and the New York Public Library. Vulture called it one of the 100 Most Important Books of the 21st Century So Far. Her fourth book, Wolf Bells, is forthcoming in early 2025. Zumas lives in Portland and teaches creative writing at Portland State University.