Full Moon at Noontide Virtual Book Tour June & July ‘10
Authors on Tour, Featured — By Dorothy Thompson on May 31, 2010 at 8:26 am
Join Ann Putnam, author of the memoir, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye (Southern Methodist University Press), as she virtually tours the blogosphere in June and July ‘10 on her first virtual book tour with Pump Up Your Book!
About Ann Putnam
ANN PUTNAM teaches creative writing and women’s studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She has published short fiction, personal essays, literary criticism, and book reviews in various anthologies such as Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and in journals, including the Hemingway Review, Western American Literature, and the South Dakota Review. Her recent release is Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye. You can visit her website at www.annputnam.com.
About Full Moon at Noontide
This is the story of my mother and father and my dashing, bachelor uncle, my father’s identical twin, and how they lived together with their courage and their stumblings, as they made their way into old age and then into death. And it’s the story of the journey from one twin’s death to the other, of what happened along the way, of what it means to lose the other who is also oneself.
My story takes the reader through the journey of the end of life: selling the family home, re-location at a retirement community, doctor’s visits, ER visits, specialists, hospitalizations, ICU, nursing homes, Hospice. It takes the reader through the gauntlet of the health care system with all the attendant comedy and sorrows, joys and terrors of such things. Finally it asks: what consolation is there in growing old, in such loss? What abides beyond the telling of my own tale? Wisdom carried from the end of the journey to readers who are perhaps only beginning theirs. Still, what interest in reading of this inevitable journey taken by such ordinary people? Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.
During the final revisions of this book, my husband was dying of cancer, and he died before I could finish it. What I know so far is this: how pure love becomes when it is distilled through such suffering and loss–a blue flame that flickers and pulses in the deepest heart.
As I finish this book he is gone three months.
Read an excerpt!
“Oh! my lover is a fisherman/ and sails on the bright blue river
In his little boat with the crimson sail/ sets he out on the dawn each morning
With his net so strong/ he fishes all the day long
And many are the fish he gathers
Oh! My lover is a fisherman
And he’ll come for me very soon!”
If only I’d known then that my true love would be a fisherman, I might have practiced that song harder and sung it with more feeling, which was what Ruth Havstad Almandinger was always trying to get me to do. If only I’d had a grown up glimpse of my true love when I was sixteen, I would have sung that song so well. If only I’d known he would have cancer and go to the lake for healing the summer after the radiation treatments were done. If only I’d known that I would be his fishing partner that miracle summer of the sockeye come into the lake from the sea. If only I’d known that the cancer would return and that I would do everything I could to save him, knowing all along that he could not be saved, and that my heart would break beyond breaking, then break again. If only I’d seen the sun coming up over the mountains and the sky shift from gray to purple and the pale smudge of light against the mountains turn gold just above the crest. If only I’d seen the sun glinting off those sunslept waters as my love lets down the fishing lines, and off in the distance a salmon leaps—a silver flashing in the sky as if to split the heart of the sun—before it disappears into a soundless splash, in this all too brief and luminous season, to spawn and to die—oh, how I would have sung that song.
Read the reviews!
‘Full Moon at Noontide’: devotion to the dignity of the elderly in decline
“Full Moon at Noontide” is Ann Putnam’s heartfelt, well-told memoir of taking care of three elderly relations.
By Barbara Lloyd McMichael Special to The Seattle Times
Read what Pump Up Your Book reviewers have to say about ‘Full Moon at Noontide’:
Jennifer at Rundpinne says, “This is indeed a book about the struggles one faces at the end of life, yet it is so much more, it is a book about love, dignity, and humanity…”
Full Moon at Noontide Tour Schedule
Tuesday, June 1
Book spotlight at Literarily Speaking
Wednesday, June 2
Interviewed at Divine Caroline
Thursday, June 3
Interviewed at Book Marketing Buzz
Friday, June 4
Book spotlighted at Examiner
Monday, June 7
Book reviewed at Rundpinne
Tuesday, June 8
Book spotlighted at Readaholic (will be rescheduled due to illness in family)
Wednesday, June 9
Interviewed at The Hot Author Report
Thursday, June 10
Guest blogging at The Story Behind the Book
Friday, June 11
Interviewed at The Writer’s Life
Monday, June 14
Interviewed on Introducing Writers Radio Show
Tuesday, June 15
Guest blogging and book giveaway at Night Owl Reviews
Wednesday, June 16
Interviewed at Literarily Speaking
Thursday, June 17
Guest blogging at Blogging Authors
Friday, June 18
Book reviewed at Bookventures Book Club
Author chat at Bookventures Book Club
Monday, June 21
Book reviewed at Joseph’s Reviews Blog
Author chat at Bookventures Book Club
Tuesday, June 22
Author chat at Bookventures Book Club
Guest blogging at The Book Boost
Wednesday, June 23
Author chat at Bookventures Book Club
Thursday, June 24
Author chat at Bookventures Book Club
Friday, June 25
Author chat at Bookventures Book Club
Tuesday, July 6
Interviewed at Beyond the Books
Wednesday, July 7
Interviewed at Examiner
Thursday, July 8
Book reviewed at Reading On a Rainy Day
Friday, July 9
Book reviewed at Tribute Books
Monday, July 12
Interviewed at As the Pages Turn
Tuesday, July 13
Interviewed at Personovelty
Wednesday, July 14
Guest blogging at The Book Boost
Thursday, July 15
Interviewed at Let’s Talk Virtual Book Tours
Friday, July 16
Guest blogging at The Writer’s Life
Monday, July 19
Guest blogging at Books R Us
Interviewed at American Chronicle
Tuesday, July 20
Book reviewed at Books R Us
Wednesday, July 21
Interviewed at Working Writers
Thursday, July 22
Guest blogging at Writing Daze
Friday, July 23
Guest blogging at The Book Connection
Monday, July 26
Book reviewed at Books 4 Moms
Tuesday, July 27
Guest blogging at Literarily Speaking
Wednesday, July 28
Interviewed at Review From Here
Thursday, July 29
Interviewed at Blogcritics
Friday, July 30
Interviewed at Broowaha
Interviewed at Pump Up Your Book
Ann Putnam’s FULL MOON AT NOONTIDE VIRTUAL BLOG TOUR ‘10 will officially begin on June 1 and end on July 30 2010. Please contact Dorothy Thompson at thewriterslife@yahoo.com before June 15 (for her July tour) if you are interested in hosting and/or reviewing her book or click here to use the form. Thank you!
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