Join us for an in-person event with Elena Sheppard to celebrate the release of her newest book, The Eternal Forest.
“Elena Sheppard’s The Eternal Forest is an elegy and a summoning—an attempt to resurrect a lost world only glimpsed through a rusted keyhole, and a reckoning with how much loss saturated that world from the start. This is writing as spell-casting and archival conjuring, a story of second-hand longing, second-hand salt breezes, second-hand grief, full of worlds layered upon worlds, all summoned with lyric grace and an expansive, generous heart.” —Leslie Jamison, New York Times bestselling author of The Empathy Exams
In The Eternal Forest: A Memoir of the Cuban Diaspora Elena Sheppard tells a powerful story of leaving and remembering. Sharing the story of her family’s exile from their homeland, she also tells the larger political story of the Cuban Revolution and its diaspora. Through a spellbinding blend of cultural myth, historical texts, and personal narrative, The Eternal Forest seeks to understand the nature of inheritance, how trauma and memory are passed down through generations, and what it means to yearn for an island you can never fully know. On Sheppard’s grandfather’s gravestone is a line from Cuban poet José Martí’s work Versos Sencillos, “A mí denme el bosque eterno” or “Give me the eternal forest.” Sheppard writes, “That forest gives me goose bumps any time I think of
it: that forest of memory, that forest of the past, that forest of the mind and what gets lost in the dark.” It was her grandparent’s memories of Cuba—especially her grandmother Rosita’s—that became the foundation of Sheppard’s childhood. They remembered Cifuentes, Cuba as an Eden. Then Fidel Castro seized power in 1959 and Sheppard’s grandfather, Gustavo, was placed on a list of political undesirables. By the end of 1960, the couple and their two daughters had fled to Florida, with nothing more than five dollars, and a suitcase each. They were certain they would return to Cifuentes within a few months, after Castro’s reign had run its course. But they never went back, and a piece of each of their identities became frozen in that moment. In 1987, Sheppard was the first in Gustavo and Rosita’s family to be born in the United States, but through her grandmother’s memories, she was always traveling back and forth in time—to before in Cuba and after in the U.S. Sheppard takes us inside these stories, and as we traverse the narrow Florida Straits that separate Miami and Havana, we also weave between past and present, to discover family secrets that are on the brink of being lost to memory.
About the Author Elena Sheppard is a graduate of Columbia University’s MFA, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Cut, The New Yorker, Vogue, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and W, as well as on NBC and MSNBC. She has been a writer-in residence at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and taught creative nonfiction and journalism in Columbia’s High School Summer Program. She lives in New York with her husband and children.
Please register so we can set the community room up with appropriate seating.
Books will be for sale at this event.