When a seemingly routine medical procedure results in her mother's premature death, Anne Panning is left reeling. In her first full-length memoir, the celebrated essayist and short story writer draws on decades of memory and experience, piecing together hard truths about her own past and her mother's. We follow Panning's winding path from rural Minnesota to the riverbanks of Vietnam's Mekong Delta. A stark, poignant tale of two women deeply connected, yet forever apart, Dragonfly Notes is a testament to the prevailing nature of love, whether in the form of a rediscovered note, a sudden moment of unexpected recall, or sometimes, simply, the sight a dragonfly flitting past. The emptiness left behind when a beloved parent dies is near impossible to describe, but Anne Panning, in Dragonfly Notes , manages to fill those hollow spaces with vivid characters, brilliant settings, keen honesty, and her accessible, inviting voice. This is a love-filled book that also acknowledges the complexity of life and parenting. -- Dinty W. Moore, author of Between Panic & Desire Dragonfly Notes took me home to the Midwest I grew up in, with its casseroles and lemon desserts, and my cousins waiting for us to gather after the funeral at their place, "a mile out of town," smack in the middle of cornfields and enormous farm machinery parked around the periphery like hulking dinosaurs. But you don't have to have been brought up on letter jackets and John Deere to be taken by the lyricism and power of this memoir. Dragonfly Notes is Panning's bruising and beautiful remembrance of her mother, who in high school took a wrong turn into an unhappy marriage. It is also the story of how we carry our childhoods through our lives and on into the raising of our own children. This is a book you will read, love, learn from, and share with others. -- Ned Stuckey-French, author of The American Essay in the American Century Anne panning is the author of three previous fiction titles, most notably Super America (University of Georgia Press, 2007), which won the 2006 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction and was a New York Times Editor's Choice selection. Several of her nonfiction pieces have also been recognized in The Best American Essays series. Originally from rural Minnesota, Panning now lives in upstate New York with her husband, Mark, and two children, Hudson and Lily. She teaches creative writing at SUNY-Brockport, where she serves as Co-Director of The Brockport Writers Forum reading series, and is currently at work on her second memoir, Bootleg Barber Shop: A Daughter's Story, about her late father, a barber and an addict.