Author Lisa Yarger to Give Reading at The Munich Readery Sunday 19 Feb

MUNICH (MunichNOW Arts & Culture)

Book launch this coming Sunday, February 19th at 16:00 at the Munich Readery, Augustenstr. 104, in the Maxvorstadt neighborhood in Munich.

Join author Lisa Yarger when she reads from her new book: Lovie: The Story of a Southern Midwife and an Unlikely Friendship (University of North Carolina Press, December, 2016)

Lovie is the true story of Lovie Beard Shelton, an elderly white midwife who delivered some 4000 babies in more than fifty years of practice in rural eastern North Carolina.

A local celebrity and self-invented folk hero, Lovie is a staunch defender of home birth, natural birth and a no-nonsense approach to labor and delivery. (“I told one woman, ‘Don’t pull that waterbed stuff on me, because I don’t want no waterbed babies.’”)

Over the years she delivered blacks, whites, Mennonites, hippies, women too poor to afford a hospital birth or a doctor and women rich enough to have any kind of delivery they pleased.

Now at the end of her career, she considers her outsider status in the medical world, the unsolved murder of her eldest son, and the deterioration of her body and memory that leave her wondering: When I’m no longer the midwife, who am I?

Struggling with a loss of energy and strength, she works to make sense of the jagged pieces of her life as she prepares for one final home birth.

Lisa Yarger is a folklorist and oral historian and the co-owner of The Munich Readery. She has made her home in Munich since 2005.

This event marks Yarger’s first public reading from Lovie before she leaves for her two-month book tour in the United States.

For more about Yarger, her book and her upcoming book tour, visit: www.lisayarger.com