Free Author Reading with Award-Winning Writer Melissa Faliveno followed by Community Open Mic

About Faliveno's novel, Hemlock:

A woman haunted by a dark inheritance returns to the woods where her mother vanished, in this queer Gothic novel—a butch Black Swan.

Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer.

As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door in the forms of a neighbor who leaves no trace, a talking doe who sounds just like Sam’s missing mother, and a series of mysterious gifts that might be a welcome or a warning. And as Sam’s stay extends—as the town’s grip on her tightens and her body takes on a strange new shape—the borders of reality begin to blur, and she senses she is battling something sinister—whether nested in the woods or within herself.

Hemlock is a carnal coming-of-addiction, a dark sparkler about rapture, desire, transformation, and transcendence in many forms. What lives at the heart of fear—animal, monster, or man? How do we contain a threat that may come from within? And how can we reject our own inheritance, the psychic storm that’s been coming for generations, and rebuild a new home for ourselves? In the tradition of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, Hemlock is a novel of singular style, with all the edginess of a survival story and a simmering menace that glints from the very periphery of the page.

Melissa Faliveno is the author of the novel Hemlock (Little, Brown, 2026) and the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature,  and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary  Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her work, which has  been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received notable selection in Best American Essays, has appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Hub, Prairie Schooner, Brevity, and Brooklyn Rail, among others, and in the anthologies Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022) and the forthcoming Hit Repeat Until I Hate Music (Split/Lip, March 2026). Born and raised in Wisconsin and the former senior editor of Poets & Writers Magazine,  Melissa is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University  of North Carolina and lives in the woods outside Chapel Hill. www.melissafaliveno.com

If you would like to read at the open mic, please send an email to driftlesswritingcenter@gmail.com with the subject line: IN-PERSON OPEN MIC, and include your name and contact information. Please prepare to read no more than 5 minutes of material.

Friday, February 13, 7-9pm

@ Vernon County Museum, 410 S Center Ave, Viroqua, WI 54665

Free and open to the public