Imagine More Deeply with Cai Emmons, via Paul Calandrino

Ink in Your Veins

This is one of Rachael’s favorite episodes, ever — join Paul as he tells us about Cai Emmons’s new book The Bells.

Paul Calandrino is a playwright, educator, and actor based in Eugene, Oregon, where Cai and he lived until she died. Since she passed, he has been curating her literary legacy with the release of this book, and he is currently collecting her blog content into book form.

Cai Emmons (1951-2023) was the author of seven novels and a story collection, Vanishing. The Bells, is her final novel. She held a BA from Yale University and two MFAs, one from New York University in film and the other from the University of Oregon in fiction. Before turning to fiction, Emmons wrote plays and screenplays. Winner of a Student Academy Award, an Oregon Book Award, and the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize, and finalist for the Narrative, The Missouri Review, and the Sarton awards, she taught at a variety of institutions, most recently in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon. She died in 2023 from Bulbar-onset ALS, a fast-progressing form of the disease that had taken her voice. The Bells, which features a protagonist with ALS, has just been released by Red Hen Press. Her final years are also the focus of an award-winning documentary Vanishing: A Love Story, directed by Sandra Luckow.

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