Saint Louis Post-Dispatch (review)

Retired teacher shows passion in Hellenga's new novel

      How many of us, as students, had a teacher like Frances Godwin?

      The protagonist in Robert Hellenga’s novel “The Confessions of Frances Godwin” is one of the good ones. She engages her students — in Latin class, no less — dreams up innovative lesson plans and challenges them to reach greater heights.

      So when she winds up a retired widow, she thinks much of her life has wound down. Ah, the surprises that await. Because Godwin winds up having some long and very entertaining conversations with God, and there’s plenty to discuss.…

      Hellenga creates a teacher you will wish you had studied with, and a character to remember.

Read the entire review in the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, July 20, 2014.

New York trip / Reading at Anderson's Bookshop

21 July 2014

            Back from a week in New York on Monday. Went to see my agent, editors at Bloomsbury and Soho, the Swann Galleries, Bob Mankoff (cartoon editor at The New Yorker), did an 80-second reading for Author’s Corner and gave a reading at a New York Knox Club event hosted by Marilyn Webb and John Sheedy. The reading included a mention of the very apartment in which I was reading. Virginia was with me at all times to make sure things went smoothly.

            On Wednesday (7/23) I’ll be reading from Confessions at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville. 7:00 pm. Anderson's Bookshop Naperville | 123 W. Jefferson Ave., Naperville.

Bloomsbury, Nancy Miller

Bob, Bob Mankoff

View from Marilyn and John's

New York Knox Club event

pub day

John Crouse

Jennifer (her first book store reading ever)

Pub day (8 July) has come and gone. Great audience at Prairie Lights last night. Drove down to Iowa City from Galesburg with my old college (U of Michigan) housemate whom I hadn't seen in fifty years. (He's the one on the  left.)

Tomorrow (8 July) is pub date for THE CONFESSIONS OF FRANCES GODWIN. I'll be reading at Prairie Lights in Iowa City.

Robert Hellenga will read from The Confessions of Frances Godwin, the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher looking back on a life of trying to do her best amidst her many transgressions. From a small town in the Midwest to the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere in Rome, The Confessions of Frances Godwin touches on the great questions of human existence: Is there something “out there” that takes an interest in us? Or is the universe ultimately indifferent?” Robert Hellenga is the author of The Sixteen Pleasures and The Fall of a Sparrow. He is a professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois.