Jennifer Dupree is next guest for ‘Author Talk’

Jennifer Dupree Courtesy image

Local author Jennifer Dupree will visit South Portland Public Library on June 1 at 6 p.m. to discuss her book “The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach.” Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Nonesuch Books.,

Author Talk is a series run by the library’s Marie Plouffe. The series has been run for the past six years and features local authors. The writers visit the library and usually talk about their latest work, read from their book, talk about the creative processes, and often end with a question-and-answer session.

Dupree is a librarian. She worked for seven years at the Windham Library and is now the library director at the Charlotte Hobbs Memorial Library in Lovell.

“In between all that, I got an MFA in creative writing from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine,” Dupree said. “And I teach a little bit of writing, I teach some workshops. I’m also an assistant editor at the Master’s Review, which is a fall literary magazine.”

Dupree started writing “The Miraculous Flight of Owen Leach” as part of her thesis nine years ago. “And then I had an agent, she tried to sell the book, she wasn’t able to sell the book, we parted ways …” Dupree said. “I wrote another book and that didn’t go anywhere, and in the meantime I was still shopping this book around, and finally found a home with Apprentice House, which is a small press that’s almost all student run on at Loyola University. It was a really great experience working with students, and it was really fun, and now it’s been out in the world for about a year.”

According to Dupree’s website, the book is about “What happens when a 19-year-old girl, alone and exhausted, follows a fleeting impulse and tosses her screaming infant son out a window? What happens if that baby is caught by a woman who — standing below— looks up and reaches out? And what if the catcher’s own fragile pregnancy ends, causing her to believe that the baby she caught is meant to be hers?”

The book, according to the website, is about “what it means to be a ‘good’ mother, and who gets to decide.”

“The last summer I did a lot of events at libraries and bookstores in Maine and New Hampshire,” said Dupree. “It was really fun to get to see other people, see people’s reactions to the books and how different it can be. You know, different people can read a book so differently, which is really fun!”