Head Case: My Father, Alzheimer’s & Other Brainstorms

About the Author\nAlexis Orgera is the author of two poetry collections, How Like Foreign Objects and DUST JACKET (Coconut Books, 2013). Her writing has appeared in Bennington Review, Black Warrior Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, Conduit, Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, Gulf Coast, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus, storySouth, Tarpaulin Sky, Third Coast, Vinyl, and elsewhere. She is an editor and cofounder of Penny Candy Books and Penelope Editions, an indie picture book press and young adult imprint that encourage big conversations. Orgera also makes art, wanders, and practices the art of growing plants for food, medicine, and connection.\nNorth Carolina writer and publisher Alexis Orgera's new memoir, HEAD CASE: MY FATHER, ALZHEIMER'S & OTHER BRAINSTORMS, is a lyric experiment written in the immediacy of grief during the end stages of her father's early Alzheimer's diagnosis at age 52--a disease that is a national epidemic. The book chronicles the visceral and painful experience of a daughter watching her beloved, formerly high functioning father disappear, and explores the stories that unfurl, daily, all around us. After moving from Los Angeles to Florida to be near her parents as they navigated her father's deteriorating condition, Orgera spent the days with her father painting, listening to music, taking walks, reading poems, sitting on the porch and later in the courtyard of his memory facility and furiously recording the moments while examining her own memories. To begin to understand the emotional impact of a human unraveling by memory loss, Orgera tells the story through a kaleidoscopic lens of mythology and religion, visual art, migraines, ghosts, poetry, and science. Both a deep lament for a well-loved man and an exploration of what it means to live a good life, HEAD CASE invites you to better understand yourself more deeply as well as the human condition.
Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Memoir.