Authors admit to the truth at Kavarna tonight

• Jason Hartley

Atlanta’s only non-fiction reading series, True Story!, returns to Kavarna tonight with a few talented locals. Jason Hartley, who recently released his first book The Advanced Genius Theory, will enlighten the crowd on the origins of his theory of Advancement. Atlanta magazine’s “writer at large” Candice Dyer has written much on southern music and southern food, which should inform her story of a boozy Oktoberfest celebration in north Georgia.

Noted fiction writer and Pushcart Prize nominee Liane Lemaster will also be on hand to tell a memoir-ish tale of family. She’s offered this intriguing excerpt from her work:

My grandmother kept the human braid in the bottom drawer of her dresser, wrapped in newspaper, dated June 14th 1926. I found it when I was seven. It was raining. Usually, when I came to visit my family in West Virginia, my mother sat at the Formica table in my grandmother’s kitchen and smoked and complained about the railroad tracks being so close to the house while my father sat in the other room and watched TV until it was time to eat again. Usually, when it didn’t rain, my cousins and I swam, fished, climbed, foraged, got lost in the woods, made tracks for people to find us, climbed, teased dogs, built huts, climbed again, and made up games that were specific and mean—if you can’t make it to the top of the hill then I will slice your head off, if you can’t make it to the next laurel branch then I will slice your head off and eat it, if you can’t make it back to Mamaw’s, then I will slice the heads off of all your family and rub them in gum and stick a spit through them and roast them like a pig, starting now. We loved it because it we were young enough and we felt safe enough to know it would never happen.

But this summer visit, the summer that I found the human hair in the drawer, my cousins weren’t around.

The reading gets started tonight, Wed., July 28, at 8 pm at Kavarna in Decatur.