Local writer Meghan Gilliss to visit South Portland for discussion of novel

Meghan Gilliss Contributed / Meghan Gilliss

Portland writer Meghan Gilliss is scheduled to visit the South Portland Public Library as part of its reading series on Jan. 25 at 6:30 p.m.

Gilliss wrote the novel “Lungfish,” about a family on an island in the Gulf of Maine. Gilliss will discuss the novel at the event and copies will be sold by Nonesuch Books.

“I had worked with Meghan at Portland Public, and her book came out, and it was really well reviewed,” said Lisa Joyce, of the South Portland Public Library. “It was reviewed in the New York Times and it was an editor’s pick for the New York Times. So I contacted her and asked if she would speak at South Portland, and she very graciously agreed to do that.”

Gilliss grew up in Kentucky and visited her grandparents in the Portland area in the summers. Gilliss has worked as a journalist, bookseller, librarian, and hospital worker. She attended the Bennington Writing Seminars and is a fellow of the Hewnoaks Artist Residency.

“I moved here in 2010 (from Columbia, Missouri, where I attended journalism school and then opened a small bookstore),” said Gilliss. “We’re still fortunate to have access to my grandparent’s home on an island in Casco Bay.”

“Lungfish” is my first novel,” she said. “It’s about a young family pushed to an unexpected brink by drug addiction. They have taken up residence (are squatting, essentially) in the narrator’s recently deceased grandmother’s home, on an otherwise uninhabited island in the Gulf of Maine. Without other resources, the narrator turns to the land to feed herself and her child — at once taking in the incredible gifts of the land, and desperate to find a way off of it before winter or the law intervenes.”