FARMINGTON — Patricia O’Donnell, award-winning fiction writer and professor of creative writing at the University of Maine at Farmington, will read from her recently released memoir “Waiting to Begin” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 27.

The reading will take place at The Landing in the UMF Olsen Student Center. It’s free and open to the public.

There will be a book-signing by O’Donnell after the reading, with books available for purchase by Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers.

Raised in the small town of Parkersburg, Iowa, O’Donnell was inspired to write this book when a tornado destroyed the town, followed by floods the same summer that destroyed other places she lived as a young woman.

As she returns to visit these sites of destruction, the experience brings back O’Donnell’s youth and her struggles as a single mother trying to raise her children while attempting to write and find the story of her life.

Author Judith Slater writes of the book: “It’s about how mistakes, or what we think at the time are mistakes, can turn out to be gifts and treasures. This beautiful book is dramatic, wise and powerful, the interweaving of past and present brilliantly done. It’s like having a glass of wine (a really good glass of wine) with a wise and funny and trusted friend.”

O’Donnell is the author of the novel “Necessary Places,” published in 2012. Her collection of short fiction, “Gods for Sale,” won the Serena Kennedy McDonald Award and will be published in 2017. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni Review, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Short Story, American Literary Review and other journals and anthologies.