{"id":25891,"date":"2002-01-29T15:00:18","date_gmt":"2002-01-29T19:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/?p=25891"},"modified":"2015-06-26T13:25:06","modified_gmt":"2015-06-26T17:25:06","slug":"author-debra-spark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2002\/01\/29\/author-debra-spark\/","title":{"rendered":"&#039;Ghost of Bridgetown&#039; author to read"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href='https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2002\/01\/debra-spark.jpg'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"185\" height=\"235\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2002\/01\/debra-spark.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium alignleft\" alt=\"debra-spark\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Novelist Debra Spark reads from her second and latest work, <em>The Ghost  of Bridgetown<\/em>, at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, in the Benjamin Mays Center,  on Russell Street at Bates College. The reading is free and open to the  public.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Spark was born outside Boston, earned degrees at Yale and the Iowa  Writers&#8217; Workshop, and lives in North Yarmouth with her husband and son.  In addition to writing novels and short stories, she is a free-lance  editor and critic, and directs the Colby College Creative Writing  Program. She tapped her family history for <em>The Ghost of Bridgetown<\/em>,  her second novel, published in September by the Graywolf Press. Set in  Barbados, the novel was inspired by a story her grandfather told her  about an incident in the Virgin Islands.<\/p>\n<p>Narrated in turn by its three main characters, the book tells the  story of a Jewish art historian, grieving her sister&#8217;s death, whose  grandfather sends her to the islands to return a menorah made there by a  slave. In choosing between the local synagogue and a cultural society  run by a slave descendant to receive the menorah, she has to deal with  her own inner ghosts and those of the island&#8217;s clashing cultures.<\/p>\n<p>Portland Phoenix reviewer Denise Porter Kemp said that in <em>Bridgetown<\/em>, Spark has &#8220;conjured up an addictively readable tale that  successfully tackles the difficult issues of familial death, painful  sibling relationships, and the deep injustices of cultural colonialism  and racism . . . &#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For more information about the reading, please call 207-786-6330.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Novelist Debra Spark reads from her second and latest work, &#8220;The Ghost of Bridgetown,&#8221; at 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, in the Benjamin Mays Center, on Russell Street at Bates College. The reading is free and open to the public.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,39,179],"tags":[2856,3271],"class_list":["post-25891","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-life","category-event-highlights","category-language-literature","tag-debra-spark","tag-english6"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25891","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25891"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25891\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91091,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25891\/revisions\/91091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25891"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25891"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25891"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}