Stacey Hettes In Conversation with Melissa Walker: Reading and Signing

Join us on May 13th at 6 PM at Hub City Bookshop for a conversation with Melissa Walker and Stacey Hettes on Hettes' new memoir Dispatches From the Couch. This debut memoir reveals the laborious, complex, but promising work of revisiting the past in order to extract its remnants of shame and loneliness from the present.

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About the Book: 

Stacey is living exactly the right life before she hits the psychological equivalent of a patch of black ice.
As Professor Hettes, her classes focus as much on neuroscience’s beauty and wonder as its facts and theories. Fellow faculty members see her as a fair but outspoken leader on a campus steeped in the blended patriarchies of academia and southern gentility.

At an emotionally charged forum on sexual violence, she takes a stand against a colleague’s reckless verbal assault, outing herself as a sexual abuse survivor in the process. Professor Hettes must continue her work even as Stacey finds herself resubmerged in the sights, sounds, and smells of her memories with Mr. Jay, a Pentecostal church deacon.
With exceptional candor, Dispatches from the Couch invites readers to take a seat beside her in the office of her new therapist, Piper. This debut memoir reveals the laborious, complex, but promising work of revisiting the past in order to extract its remnants of shame and loneliness from the present.

About the Author: 

Professor Stacey Hettes teaches biology and neuroscience to undergraduates eager to enter the worlds of science and medicine at Wofford College in Spartanburg, SC. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Riverside, and is the youngest winner to date of the Milliken Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Science. Her classes are difficult because life is difficult. They are also full of wonder, joy, and triumph because, like her students, she is a hard-working seeker. She relishes in shared struggle and shared discovery, even when the topic is long-buried child sexual abuse. Reemerging from the shadows of her past was only possible once she resolved to carry the story found in her debut memoir, DISPATCHES FROM THE COUCH into the light.

Conversation Partner: 

Dr. Melissa Walker is an award-winning teacher and scholar. She was the first faculty member at Converse University to hold the George Dean Johnson, Jr. Chair in History. She is co-editor of Southern Women at the Millennium, an edited collection of essays drawn from a 2001 conference she helped organize at Converse. Her edited collection of oral histories, Country Women Cope with Hard Times, was published by University of South Carolina Press in 2004. She also co-edited a book called Work Family and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century with Dr. Rebecca Sharpless of Texas Christian University. Her book, The Battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens: The American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry, grew out of the course she teaches in January term. Her most recent book, Kansas Boy: The Memoir of A.J. Bolinger, was a project she co-edited with the late Converse President Dr. Jeff Barker.She served on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern History and the executive committee of the Southern Historical Association. She served on several community boards including the board of Hub City Writers Project, a Spartanburg literary arts organization.