Thursday, June 16, 7 PM: Henry Alley, Author Event: Reading, Q & A and Signing
Henry (Hank) will be reading from his new book, “Galen’s Legacy.”
Galen's Legacy
Imprisonment gives you time to think. Who gets your attention, the gay uncle who died of AIDS and has special wishes, and was like a father to you, or your distant, enterprising and sometimes disapproving mother? It can be all the more confusing when you think that your dead uncle is sending you messages. In his forties, Galen Melville, an openly gay man, emerges from prison in the mid-1990s, exonerated from a crime he did not commit. Now free, Galen returns to the idyllic landscape of his Oregon hometown whose center is the eccentric Vondel hotel run by his quirky Dutch family. Suddenly he discovers that perhaps the ghost of his beloved uncle is afoot in the bequeathed abandoned mansion across the street and perceives mysterious signs of guidance in his search for right relationships with his young son and grown daughter. In the quest to find himself, he hooks up with two muscular and beautiful men, Anton the landscaper, Brent, the physical therapist, one older and one younger. He also fights to establish his uncle’s mansion as a refuge for gay and lesbian people. As though presented in a landscape in a Renaissance painting, this sensually evoked, affirmative, often comic, sometimes sexually explicit novel follows Galen through a slowly evolving pastoral world, made vivid and scenic in cadenced, riveting prose, where his mother finds a renewed sense of her poetic vocation, his father finds sobriety, and his older lover discovers his roots and liberation from the closet.
https://honors.uoregon.edu/henry-alley (Masks in the building during event, Please)
Other Books and Stories by Henry Alley
Through Glass (novel, Iris Press, 1979)
The Lattice (novel, Ariadne Press, 1986)
Umbrella of Glass (novel, Breitenbush Books, 1988)
The Quest for Anonymity: The Novels of George Eliot (literary criticism, University of Delaware Press, 1997)
Precincts of Light (novel, Inkwater Press, 2010)
The Dahlia Field (short story collection, Chelsea Station Editions, 2017)
Men Touching (novel, Chelsea Station Editions, 2019)