MFA Alumna D.K. McCutchen Celebrates New Book 'Jellyfish Dreaming' with Book Tour

Arts
Jellyfish Dreaming

Author D.K. McCutchen '03MFA will celebrate the release of her new book, "Jellyfish Dreaming," available Aug. 22, with several upcoming events in western Massachusetts.

Events include:

  • Arms Library, Shelburne Falls, MA, on Saturday, July 29, at 6:30 p.m.
  • Forbes Library, Northampton, MA, on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 6 p.m.
  • Odyssey Books, South Hadley, MA, on Tuesday, Aug. 22, 7 p.m.
  • Broadside Books, Northampton, MA, on Tuesday, Oct. 17, 7 p.m.
  • Lava Center, Greenfield, MA, on Tuesday, Dec. 19, 7 p.m.

"Jellyfish Dreaming" is the recipient of the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize. The speculative fiction novel is set beside the Atlantic-Coast-that-was, near an aging University, hard Fisher people from a dozen races and places fetch up in the Trash Cafe, the last stop before the Great Garbage Ocean. The ocean coughs up jellyfish and plastic rubbish these days.

But Jack remembers things no one else does, like birds and frogs. The lonely, 200-year-old teenager never quite makes it to adulthood before resetting, like the immortal jellyfish Turitopsis. Then Jack falls for Joon, one of the tough street kids who can choose their own gender. Even Jack barely remembers the environmental catastrophes that caused mass extinctions and changed the town’s youngest survivors. But when old bigotries erupt into violence, Jack surprises himself by racing to outwit a madman trying to destroy the fledgling inheritors of a dying world—even if the cost is his not-quite-immortal life.

McCutchen is also the author of the creative nonfiction book "Whale Road," which was a Pushcart nominee and named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book. Based on a true tale of the voyage, "Whale Road" embraces magical realism in a story told to an unborn child, in which a sailor falls off a cliff and turns into an albatross and a pod of female sperm whales chase the setting sun.

About D.K. McCutchen

HFA alumna D.K. McCutchen teaches writing for the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Natural Sciences, for which she is also an associate director of the of the Junior Year Writing Program. She has also been a long-term member of the University Writing Committee. McCutchen lives on a river with two brilliant daughters and a flightless Kiwi. Publications include LGBTQIA-friendly gender-bender-post-apocalyptic-speculative- fiction, JELLYFISH DREAMING, MCC finalist & winner of a Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize, & WHALE ROAD, a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book & Pushcart nominee about sailing with whale researchers through the South Pacific. Published in Fourth Genre, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Rosebud, Identity Theory, LCRW & several FISH anthologies, she’s currently editing ICE, winner of a Speculative Literature Foundation grant.

Article posted in Arts for Alumni and Public