This event takes place on Crowdcast, Charis' virtual event platform. This event is free, but registration is required for virtual attendance.

Charis welcomes Shelby Hinte (Howling Women), Tamara Jong (Worldly Girls), Madeline McDonnell (Lonesome Ballroom), and Lauren W. Westerfield (Woman House) for a panel discussion surrounding the shared themes of mother-daughter dynamics, tropes of femininity, and ancillary relationships with men in their most recent books. This panel will be moderated by McKenzie Watson-Fore.

Sabine Haegan has spent a lifetime desperate to escape her violent past. But when her life in California falls apart, she returns to New Mexico, the state she abandoned more than a decade prior. Searching for salvation in the desert, she meets Howling Woman, a woman who has never surrendered to the brutality of men. Under the spell of the summer sun, a mysterious vortex, and the enigmatic air of Howling Woman, Sabine spirals toward the center of what has haunted her all these years, and a single act of violence unearths everything she's tried to bury. Now, out on bail and awaiting trial, Sabine feverishly attempts to set the record straight about the man she's shot and the choices she's made. Howling Women is a metafictional confessional about violence, female rage, sex, addiction, and the lengths one woman goes to rewrite a history she never consented to.

With clear-eyed honesty and written in sparse yet searing prose, Jong collects the fragments of her unconventional childhood, with her busy schedule of Jehovah’s Witness meetings, Bible study, and door-to-door ministering. She also details her emotionally distant father and alcoholic mother’s tumultuous marriage, her deep yearnings to become a mother after the loss of her own, and her struggles with mental health.

After corporate and spiritual burnout, and a suicide attempt at the age of thirty-two, Jong comes to understand that the strict religion she had long believed would protect her prevented her from pursuing her true sense of self. In a story that traverses a wide range of potent themes—including addiction, estrangement, grief, infertility, and forgiveness—the ultimate message of Worldly Girls is one of hope as Jong finds her own path to healing and belonging.

Meet Betty Block—docile daughter, woebegone wife, aspiring aspirant, and anti-heroine for the ages! Or is the narrator of Madeline McDonnell’s farcical, heartbreaking, and formally brilliant first novel just another woman caught in the sneakily patriarchal plots of the early-aughts? And has she left her ostensibly sensitive husband for an hour or two or forever? As Betty pulls up a chair at the Lonesome Ballroom and tries to explain herself to Lizzie, her erudite-but-distant bartender, she finds herself as trapped by her generation’s competing expressions of sincerity and sarcasm as her mother was by the incomplete feminism of the ’70s and her grandmother by the insidious sweetness of Hollywood’s Golden Age. An inquiry into gender’s relationship to popular aesthetics that swirls from ancient epics to turn-of-the-millennium reality shows, mid-century melodramas to neo-noir car chases, beauteous battle scenes to boy-next-door meet-cutes, Lonesome Ballroom is also a dazzling and rambunctious performance in prose.

Woman House: Essays and Assemblages by Lauren W. Westerfield
For years, Lauren W. Westerfield looked back at her childhood as an imaginative playscape lovingly crafted by her artist mother. But in truth, theirs was always a fraught relationship, close yet turbulent. It wouldn’t be until her mid-twenties that Westerfield would learn that her mother was assaulted while living as a single woman in 1970s Los Angeles, or until her mid-thirties when caretaking for her now chronically ill mother during pandemic lockdown would reveal how that earlier incident and its ripple effects had shaped both their lives.

The essays and assemblages in this book plumb the depths of two women’s experiences, exploring the pain and pleasure they find in their bodies, in culture, and in their own art. Violence, beauty, and love reverberate and dissipate and shape the forms and psyches of these two profoundly connected family members. At once raw and refined, narrative and lyrical, nostalgic and blunt, the stories and images presented here explore Westerfield’s life—from childhood to adulthood—passing through innocence, self-discovery and familial tethers. In unpacking her mother’s history and the complexities of their relationship, Westerfield finds herself confronted with her own story: one grounded in a yearning for agency and individuation, of a body and mind groomed to be at odds with one another, of a feminist politics examining deeply rooted patriarchal understandings of beauty, control, and power.

Shelby Hinte is a writer and teacher in Northern California. She teaches writing classes at the Writing Salon in San Francisco and online at Writing Workshops. She has been a reader and intern for various independent presses and magazines including ZYZZYVA, Split/Lip Press, and No Contact. Her writing has been featured in BOMB Magazine, The Rumpus, ZYZZYVA, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Howling Women is her first novel.

Tamara Jong is a Tiohtià:ke (Montréal) born writer of Chinese and European ancestry. Her work has been published in the Humber Literary Review, Room Magazine, and The Fiddlehead, and has been both long and shortlisted for various creative non-fiction prizes. She is a graduate of The Writer’s Studio at Simon Fraser University, and a former member of Room Magazine’s collective. She currently lives and works on Treaty 3 territory, the occupied and ancestral lands of the Haudenosaunee, Anishinabewaki, Attiwonderonk, and Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (Guelph, Ontario, Canada). Worldly Girls is her first book.

Madeline McDonnell is the author of the debut novel, Lonesome Ballroom—which is a finalist for a 2026 Oregon Book Award—and two other brief books of fiction. She lives in Corvallis, OR, with her husband, daughter, and son. Find her online at madelinemcdonnell.com.

Lauren W. Westerfield is the author of Woman House and Depth Control. Her essays and poetry have been published in FENCE, Seneca Review, Willow Springs, Denver Quarterly, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. Westerfield is a 2022 Idaho Commission on the Arts Literary Fellow. She teaches at Washington State University, where she serves as the editor-in-chief of Blood Orange Review.

McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and critic currently based in Boulder County, Colorado, where she is founder and host of the Thunderdome Conference. She serves as executive editor of sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for MAYDAY. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Rumpus, Electric Literature, the Offing, Full Stop, Christian Century, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a memoir titled This Is Exactly What My Mother Was Afraid Of.

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A Song of Mothers and Daughters: An Author Panel