Pacific Northwest Writer

Putsata Reang

author of the award-winning memoir Ma and Me

in conversation with series host

Michael N. McGregor

author of Pure Act and the forthcoming novel The Last Grand Tour

6 p.m., Thursday, November 14

Cascadia Art Museum, 190 Sunset Ave, Edmonds, WA 98020

(To order tickets through the Cascadia website, click here)

Putsata Reang was born in Cambodia and came to the U.S. as a baby as part of the influx of refugees from Southeast Asia in the 80s and 90s. Her debut memoir, Ma and Me (published in 2022 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux), tells the story not only of her family’s harrowing flight from their ravaged homeland but also her childhood in small-town Oregon.

There, she endured the struggles of being an immigrant in a land often hostile to immigrants and coming out as gay in a conservative environment while trying to fulfill her parents’ traditional expectations.

Among the many things her book explores are the long legacy of inherited trauma and the crushing weight of cultural and filial expectations. At its heart, Ma and Me is a deeply moving memoir about love, debt, and duty.

Reang went on to become an award-winning journalist, whose writings have appeared in the New York Times, Politico, the Guardian, The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and other publications. Ma and Me received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association’s prize for nonfiction and was a finalist for both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Lambda Literary Prize. It has been lauded by publications as diverse as BuzzFeed, NBC News, and Ms. magazine.

Having lived and worked in more than a dozen countries, including Thailand and Afghanistan, Reang returned to Cambodia in 2005 to report on landless farmers there. Today, she lives in Seattle, where she teaches memoir writing in the University of Washington’s School of Professional & Continuing Education while speaking frequently about her life and writing at colleges and conferences.

In a starred review, Publisher’s Weekly calls Ma and Me “A nuanced mediation on love, identity, and belonging.” BookPage says it “stands apart as a work of lyrical beauty, exploring culture, duty, guilt and family with heartbreaking clarity.”

You can purchase Putsata Reang’s memoir online at the Edmonds Bookshop.

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About the Cascadia Writers-in-Conversation Series

On the second Thursday of each month, host Michael N. McGregor will bring one Northwest writer in front of an enthusiastic audience for a brief reading, a discussion of the author’s work, and a question-and-answer session with engaged literature lovers.

The series is intended to showcase the wealth of writing talent in the Pacific Northwest. To that end, it will feature writers from different genres at different stages of their careers who may have been overlooked rather than those readers already know.

Writers who appear in the series will be featured on WritingtheNorthwest.com.

This is a unique chance to hear talented writers speak in-depth about what it means to be an author in the Northwest and why and how they create their works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. The conversations will all take place in one of Cascadia’s beautiful galleries, with Northwest art lining the walls.

Cascadia Art Museum is the only museum dedicated to artists and their works from the Pacific Northwest. Focused on visual art and design from 1860 to 1970, it is committed to the belief that recognizing previously neglected artists who made significant contributions to the region’s cultural identity gives us a fuller and more comprehensive understanding of Northwest art history. The Writers-in-Conversation series signals the museum’s desire to highlight underappreciated Northwest artists in literature as well. The series is sponsored by the Edmonds Bookshop and Holman.

Michael N. McGregor is Seattle-based author whose book Pure Act: The Uncommon Life of Robert Lax was a finalist for a Washington State Book Award. After living his early life in Seattle, he spent 17 years as an award-winning professor of creative writing at Portland State University, where he helped found the MFA in Creative Writing program. A former member of the Advisory Committee for the Oregon Book Awards and Fellowships, he holds a BA in Journalism from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University in New York. His next book, The Last Grand Tour (a novel), will be published on January 28, 2025, by Portland publisher Korza Books.

Note: I’m an affiliate of Bookshop.org, where your purchases support local bookstores. If you buy a book through a click on this website, I’ll earn a small commission that helps defray the costs of maintaining WritingtheNorthwest.com.