Laura Warrell is a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared on HuffPost, and in The Rumpus and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among other publications. She has taught creative writing and literature at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and through the Emerging Voices Program at PEN America in Los Angeles. In Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm (Pantheon), it’s 2013, and Circus Palmer is a 41-year-old Boston-based trumpet player and old-school ladies’ man. When he learns before a gig in Miami that the woman who is secretly closest to his heart, the free-spirited drummer Maggie, is pregnant by him, he flees. Palmer lives for his music and refuses to be tied down. But by running away instead of facing the necessary conversation, he sets off a chain of interlocking revelations from the various women in his life. The most notable among them is his teenage daughter, Koko. She idolizes him and is awakening to her own sexuality, even as her mentally fragile mother struggles to overcome Palmer’s rejection. Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm explores the perennial dangers of desire and finding belonging when love is unrequited.
