The Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author event with Maine author Penny Guisinger on Thursday, September 26 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room for her new memoir Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions. 

Penny Guisinger was not always attracted to women. In Shift she recounts formative relationships with women and men, including the marriage that produced her two children and ultimately ended in part due to her affair with her now-wife. Beginning her story as straight and ending as queer, she struggles to make sense of how her identity changed so profoundly while leaving her feeling like the same person she’s always been. While covering pivotal periods of her life, including previous relationships and raising her children across the chasm of divorce, Guisinger reaches for quantum physics, music theory, planetary harmonics, palmistry, and more to interrogate her experiences. This personal story plays out against the backdrop of the national debate on same-sex marriage, in rural, easternmost Maine, where Guisinger watched her neighbors vote against the validity of her family.

Shift examines sexual and romantic fluidity while wrestling with the ways past and present mingle rather than staying in linear narratives. Under scrutiny, Guisinger’s sense of her own identity becomes like a Mobius strip or Penrose triangle—an optical illusion that challenges the dimensions and possibilities of the world.

Penny Guisinger is the author of Postcards from Here and the forthcoming Shift: A Memoir of Identity and Other Illusions. Her work has appeared in Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Guernica, Solstice Literary Magazine, and others. Pushcart nominated, a Maine Literary Award winner, and a three-time notable in Best American Essays, she is a co-director of Iota Short Forms and a former assistant editor at Brevity. Penny is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA Program.

This program is free and open to all, and will be held in the library's Howard Room. For more information, please email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas[at]bhpl.net or call the libarry at 374-5515. Copies of this book will be available for purchase from Blue Hill Books at the event.