Erin Miller Reid in Conversation with Cathy Rigg

Join us for an evening with Erin Miller Reid, who will be in conversation with Cathy Rigg. After their discussion of Erin's new novel But For Fortune and an audience Q&A, Erin will be signing copies of her books.

About the Book

On the surface, Corinth Eaton's life is going according to plan. She is succeeding in her third year of medical school and in a serious relationship with a man she intends to marry. In reality, Corinth is barely afloat, struggling with debilitating anxiety and depression, as well as the recent death of her father. A split-second decision results in her suspension from surgery rotation and reassignment to Maxwood, the state psychiatric institution where her grandmother was a patient for decades. When Corinth discovers Granny's chart at Maxwood, she's desperate to make sense of the narrative in its pages―events her family refuses to discuss. Corinth had only ever known Granny as docile and incoherent from years of medication and institutionalization, unable to provide her own account. But Corinth's rotation at Maxwood might just allow her to connect with her grandmother in ways she couldn't before.

Blooming from the seeds of author Erin Miller Reid's family history, But for Fortune follows two women fifty years apart as they attempt to give voice to their own silenced realities. What unfolds is a whirling intergenerational exploration of mental illness, discrimination, and the insidious nature of family secrets. Writing in lush prose and drawing on her own experiences as a doctor, Reid weaves together a story that is at once incisive, heartfelt, and deeply human.

About the Author

Erin Miller Reid is a writer and physician from southeastern Kentucky. Her work has appeared in North Carolina Literary Review, Still, Appalachian Review, Women Speak: Women of Appalachia Project, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, 100 Days in Appalachia, and the anthology Troublesome Rising: A Thousand-Year Flood in Eastern Kentucky. She earned her master of public health and doctor of medicine degrees at the University of Kentucky and completed education in narrative medicine at Columbia University.

About the Conversation Partner

Cathy Rigg was born and raised in the Appalachian Mountains of Southwest Virginia where her people, on her mother’s side, go back generations. She moved to South Carolina after college and founded the brand marketing firm, Riggs Partners. Rigg’s fiction and poetry have appeared in Litmosphere: Journal of Charlotte Lit, Still: the Journal, Clinch Mountain Review, and other publications. She and her husband divide their time between Columbia, SC, and Burnsville, NC, where they stare at the view and obsess over the bears on a ridge high above Asheville.