A screening of the documentary The Last Ecstatic Days, followed by “In My Good Death,” a writing workshop with author Nickole Brown.
Tickets $25 in advance / $30 at the door
Story Parlor | 227 Haywood Road
Parking & Policies
Alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages available for purchase. All shows, unless specified, are ages 16+.
6:30pm Doors
7:00pm Introduction
7:20pm Screening of The Last Ecstatic Days
8:50pm Writing Workshop
Please bring a pen and notebook.
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“No one teaches us how to die,” wrote Eva Saulitis in 2014, after her cancer had metastasized into her right lung. “Facing death in a death-phobic culture is lonely.” But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if we didn’t center conversations around ways in which we don’t want to die and instead imagined (even planned for or dreamt up) our best possible deaths? Can we prepare to leave our bodies with grace? If so, how might we find the language to do so? What words might be strong enough to hold such immense grief and terror, what words might be capable of saying goodbye to the ones you love but also, eventually, to say goodbye to your own self?
In this writing workshop (open to writers at any and all levels), we’ll start by sharing poems that have accomplished this task in one way or another, reading lines from everyone from Rilke to Andrea Gibson, Lucille Clifton to Ross Gay. Then, as we watch “The Last Ecstatic Days” together, we’ll take notes throughout, seeking out words that might bring us closer to the steady, willful peace depicted in this documentary. Afterward, we’ll enter into a guided writing exercise and share our findings with the hope that we might cease our spiraling around fears of death’s inevitability and instead strengthen muscles of gratitude and acceptance.
FEATURING…
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Nickole Brown received her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, studied literature at Oxford University, and was the editorial assistant for the late Hunter S. Thompson. She worked at Sarabande Books for ten years. She’s the author of Sister, first published in 2007 with a new edition reissued in 2018. Her second book, Fanny Says (BOA Editions), won the Weatherford Award for Appalachian Poetry in 2015. Currently, she teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and lives in Asheville, NC, where she volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. Since 2016, she’s been writing about these animals. To Those Who Were Our First Gods, a chapbook of these first nine poems, won the 2018 Rattle Prize, and her essay-in-poems, The Donkey Elegies, was published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020. She’s the President of the Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual environmental literary festival set to launch in Black Mountain, NC, in October of 2025.
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Synopsis
Ethan Sisser, a young man with terminal brain cancer, sits alone in his hospital room. When he starts livestreaming his death journey on social media, thousands of people around the world join to celebrate his courage. Still, Ethan envisions more – to teach the world how to die without fear. To do that, he needs to film his death.
Honoring Ethan's wish, his doctor Aditi Sethi transports him to an idyllic house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Asheville, North Carolina. What unfolds next is a story rarely glimpsed: how a community of strangers helps a young man die with grace.
A sensory immersion into leaving the body, “The Last Ecstatic Days” reveals a man who will not let us forget him – even after he’s taken his final breath.