Join us as we welcome author Clare Beams in conversation with Becky Tuch! In The Illness Lesson a utopian all-girls boarding school in 1870s Massachusetts becomes a Hitchcockian landscape where a handful of male educators and physicians are certain that they know what's best for their young female students. Are the girls in fact ill? What kind of treatment does a hidebound patriarchal medical establishment implement behind closed doors to young women? And who gets to judge whether a patient’s claims about their own experiences are to be believed or overruled for their own good?

Turning to the histories of transcendentalism, education, and Victorian medical practices, Clare Beams uses America’s own past to present a novel that is as timeless as it is urgent. Offering an exciting new voice, her fiction has previously appeared in One Story and The Best American Nonrequired Reading and has received special mention by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize. She has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Becky Tuch is a writer and teacher, based in Pittsburgh, PA. She has earned awards and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, Moment Magazine, Glimmer Train and elsewhere. Other writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Salon, McSweeney's, Virginia Quarterly Review online, Tikkun Magazine, Post Road, Literary Mama, Carolina Quarterly, and many other magazines and anthologies, including Best of the Net. She is the Founding Editor of The Review Review. 

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