Books by Anne Panning

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 draws on decades of memory and experience as she pieces together the 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 and all the way back again-a stark, poignant tale of two women deeply connected, yet somehow 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.

In settings as different as Honolulu, Hawaii, small-town Minnesota, and Taxco, Mexico, this collection of nine stories and a novella show blue-collar characters struggling to achieve the American Dream - and sometimes alienating friends and family as they try to upgrade their working-class pedigree.

Tells a coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of small-town Minnesota during the 1970s and told from the perspective of an eleven-year-old girl, Iris, who learns from her parents that she is adopted.