Author Talk with Jim Linnell

This event is past.

  • Sep 17, 2019

The Lewiston Public Library will welcome professor, author, Auburn native and Bates College graduate Jim Linnell to speak about and read from his new, critically-acclaimed book, Take It Lying Down: Finding My Feet After a Spinal Cord Injury, at the Lewiston Public Library on Tuesday, September 17th at 12:00 noon. This free, public program will take place in Callahan Hall. The talk will be followed by a book signing, with copies available for purchase.

In Take It Lying Down, Jim Linnell tells the story of how, at six months shy of retirement and on a family vacation in Mexico, he steps off the porch of a rental house and breaks his neck. He is medevacked to his hometown hospital in Albuquerque and from there to a spinal cord injury hospital in Denver, where he learns he may live the rest of his life as a quadriplegic. How does a person absorb such news?

Jim’s injury is incomplete: He has a two-year window for improvement. After three months of rehabilitation at the hospital, he and his wife, Jennifer, return to their home with an armada of equipment for his therapy, a heavy dose of anxiety about how they will manage together, and many unanswerable questions: Will Jim get better? What kind of future will they have? Can they move past denial to accept the possibility that Jim may remain a quadriplegic?

In the foreword to the memoir, Len Jenkin writes that Take It Lying Down is “a movingly intricate weave—a detailed and poetic chronicle of healing against all odds, an intense love story, a narrative of a young man’s journey from Maine to New Mexico and adulthood, and a book of literary inspiration and wisdom . . . this is not a medical book, not a self-help book: it’s a literate, occasionally theatrical, surprisingly buoyant, always philosophical and compelling journey through one man’s life.”

In a starred review, Kirkus called it “a stunning account.”

Linnell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre and Dance at the University of New Mexico and is its former Dean of the College of Fine Arts. He is also the author of Walking on Fire: The Shaping Force of Emotion in Writing Drama.

For further details, please contact the Adult Services Desk at the Lewiston Public Library: 207-513-3135 or LPLReference@Gmail.com