Evacuation Plan
Evacuation Plan Media Kit
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“A rich and compelling book of life,” from the foreword by Joe Holley, Washington Post obituary writer
Matt, a fledgling screenwriter, volunteers to work with the terminally ill in exchange for a good plot for his next script. He meets the people who work, die, and mourn in this world of last moments. In the novel-in-stories style of Tim O’Brien’s July July and Charles Baxter’s The Feast of Love, O’Connell’s characters in Evacuation Plan reveal themselves in poignantly unfolding stories: the gambler who played a risky game involving his wife and his ex-con father; the mortician who was an unwed father-to-be; the daughter whose dying father has no clue about the night her world spun out of control; the nurse who lived among aging neighbors and struggled to hold her own family in place; the drunk who magically encountered himself as a boy. Forgiveness, joy, making the final leap. Evacuation Plan is the story of a world in which the clock ticks off the final moments for all of us and makes of those moments a lifetime.
About the Author: Joe O’Connell has met a mass murderer, prowled a crack house, and spat seeds at a watermelon thump. He’s a Texas native whose early career focused on small-town journalism. He earned an MFA in creative writing from Southwest Texas State University where he worked long distance with the late short story master Andre Dubus. O’Connell’s stories have appeared in The G.W. Review, Other Voice, Confrontation, Lullwater Review and many other journals. His stories have taken first prize at both the Deep South Writers Conference and in the Louzelle Rose Barclay Awards. Of late, he teaches writing to graduate students at St. Edward’s University and to undergraduates at Austin Community College. He turned a budding career as a movie extra- otherwise known as “scenery”- into a gig as a film industry columnist for the Dallas Morning News and The Austin Chronicle. He also has contributed to Variety and Texas Monthly.
Praise for Evacuation Plan
Joe O’Connell’s fictional screenwriter has one advantage over the real-life obituary writer, in that he’s able to meet the people he writes about before death asserts its tyranny. What we have in common, however, is something quite profound: We’re both dealing with death, but we’re writing about life. Evacuation Plan itself may be set in a hospice, but it is, in fact, a rich and compelling book of life. -Joe Holley, Washington Post obituary writer
In Evacuation Plan Joe O’Connell does for the process of dying what Sherwood Anderson did for middle America in Winesburg, Ohio- he shows us in brief flashes the aching beauty of the grotesque, and shows us how extraordinary small lives and quiet deaths can be. -John Blair, Drue Heinz Literature Prize winning author of American Standard
Here’s a book so rich with stories of the living, so filled with people’s bountiful problems, as well as incidents of wry forgiveness, one realizes over and over the circling forces of life’s completeness. It’s not a sad tale nor a needless feel-good account but a balanced, sometimes comic, affirmation of what is here and what we all know is waiting. -Carolyn Osborn, award-winning short story writer
Reading Evacuation Plan is akin to unwrapping a series of small perfectly-chosen presents. Both human and humane, the book resembles a modern Spoon River Anthology with its vivid, touching glimpses into the lives of those in and around a hospice. -Tim McCanlies, screenwriter The Iron Giant, writer/director Secondhand Lions
O’Connell’s protagonist skillfully navigates under the guise of a writer seeking raw materials for his craft in the stories of the dying, but mines and refines instead the stuff we’re all made of. -Jesse Sublett, cancer survivor, rocker and author of Never the Same Again
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Purchase Information
Purchase Information
Book Sellers and Libraries: Please contact your favorite wholesaler, or buy directly from:
Other Buyers: E-mail neil@daltonpublishing.com
