Virtual Event – David Tromblay

Magic City Books is proud to host the book launch event for David Tromblay in celebration of his new memoir, As You Were on Tuesday, February 16. David will be joined in conversation by filmmaker Sterlin Harjo.

Tromblay’s memoir is a hypnotic, brutal, and unstoppable coming-of-age tale–told from inside the shockwaves set off by the Indian boarding schools, exacerbated by a decade and a half spent inside the Armed Forces–exposing a series of inescapable prisons and invisible scars of attempted erasure.

This free event will take place on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the event on Zoom, visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iK69zFotSHm_gwb5JlqisA

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email with details about how to join on Tuesday, February 16 at 7:00 central.

As You Were goes on sale on February 16, 2021. You can order a copy in advance by visiting Magic City Books in downtown Tulsa or by visiting: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/as-you-were/400.

About As You Were

When he learns his father is dying, David Tromblay ponders what will become of the monster’s legacy and picks up a pen to set the story straight.

In sharp and unflinching prose, he recounts his childhood bouncing between his father, who wrestles with anger, alcoholism, and a traumatic brain injury; his grandmother, who survived Indian boarding schools but mistook the corporal punishment she endured for proper child-rearing; and his mother, a part-time waitress, dancer, and locksmith, who hides from David’s father in church basements and the folded-down back seat of her car until winter forces her to abandon her son on his grandmother’s doorstep.

For twelve years, he is beaten, burned, humiliated, locked in closets, lied to, molested, seen and not heard, until his talent for brutal violence meets and exceeds his father’s, granting him an escape.

Years later, David confronts the compounded traumas of his childhood, searching for the domino that fell and forced his family into the cycle of brutality and denial of their own identity.

David Tromblay served in the U.S. Armed Forces for over a decade before attending the Institute of American Indian Arts for his MFA in Creative Writing. His essays and short stories have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Pank Magazine; Michigan Quarterly Review; RED INK: International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, & Humanities; The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature; Yellow Medicine Review; Open: Journal of Arts & Letters; Watershed Review; FIVE:2: ONE Magazine; and BULL: Men’s Magazine. He currently lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma with his dogs, Bentley and Hank.