STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

John Rember, who lives in the Sawtooth Valley, will read from his “Journals of the Plague Years” at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, March 16, at Hailey Town Center West.

Rember penned the selections during the height of the COVID pandemic. He draws on his sense of humor as he writes about life during the various pestilences of pandemic coronavirus, pandemic tourism, pandemic economic and political injustice, pandemic climate and the pandemic breakdown of civil discourse.

The new essays add to three books of short stories including “Coyote in the Mountains” and “A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World,” which ironically came out just before the pandemic.

His memoir “Traplines: Coming Home to Sawtooth Valley” was awarded Idaho Book of the Year in 2004 by the Idaho Library Association. His book “MFA in a Box: A Why to Write Book,” was recognized as one of the best new books on creative writing by the Nautilus Awards, Hoffer Awards and Midwest Book Awards.

Rember is a fourth-generation local born in the Sun Valley Lodge when the hospital was on the third floor. Consequently his writing often reflects on the meaning of place, the impact of tourism on the West and the weirdness of everyday life.

Educated at Harvard, he earned his MFA at the University of Montana and went on to become a professor at the College of Idaho in Caldwell and at the Pacific University MFA program in Oregon.