David Gramling, Strange

The March 2016 "Strange" show was an evening full of laughter, but David Gramling's story about the final years of his father's life added some poignancy to the proceedings. Which isn't to say David's story doesn't include humor -- his reflections on the ways his father found to deal with dementia --  a personal world that had suddenly turned strange -- are by turns joyful, beautiful, and surprisingly funny. Telling this story almost exactly on the anniversary of his father's death, David doesn't shy away from the pain of loss, but he also embraces the example of a man who struggled with all his considerable might to continue living his life, no matter how difficult that became. From David's Odyssey bio: David Gramling publishes regularly on multilingual film and literature, Turkish German migration and literary history, theoretical approaches to monolingualism, foreign language pedagogy, gender and LGBT studies, and the medical humanities. David is the author of The Invention of Monolingualism, published in October 2016 with Bloomsbury. He was a Translation Fellow with the National Endowment for the Arts for his collaboration with Aron Aji (University of Iowa) on a collection of the poems of Murathan Mungan, entitled My Heart's East. David teaches in the Department of German Studies at the U of A. This episode was performed and recorded in front of a live audience at The Screening Room in Tucson, AZ, on March 3rd, 2016, and was curated by Simon Donovan. For more information about Odyssey Storytelling, please visit www.odysseystorytelling.com