An Eastern professor used the experience of her father’s brain disorder as inspiration for her first full-length published collection poetry book.

Assistant English professor Charlotte Pence will be reading passages from her newly published book called “Many Small Fires” 6 p.m. Thursday in the lecture hall in the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

This is Pence’s first published full-length poetry collection.

She said the book took her five years to complete from concept to publication.

She wanted to publish a full-length collection since she was an MFA student at Emerson College.

“It is a wonderful feeling to have achieved that goal,” she said.

Pence said before this book, she submitted had two other manuscripts she submitted to publishers.

One of them was later published as a chapbook called “Weaves a Clear Night,” and the other was pulled from consideration because it became a finalist in a contest.

“I realized that I didn’t want that book to be my first full-length collection. It didn’t quite represent who I was or where I had come from to the same extent,” she said.

“I had already written some of the poems that are now in ‘Many Small Fires,’ but it was far from being a book. Once I realized what I wanted to do, what that book should be, I solely focused on that project.”

The book is about her father, his schizophrenia and other experiences.

“‘Many Small Fires’ addresses my father’s schizophrenia and chronic homelessness through the larger evolutionary story of the human species,” she said.  “Questions about how we came to create communities and homes play out against more intimate questions of my community.”

Pence said she hesitated to write about the subject of her father’s experiences.

“The subject matter is one that I actually didn’t want to address at first, considering how personal it is,” she said.  “I also wanted to respect my fathers and his privacy.  At the same time, I felt like it was an important story to tell.”

Pence said she is happy to see her ideas in print and to be able to hold them in her hands.

She said her book is divided up into three sections and she will be reading from all of them.

“I’m going to read from all three sections of the new book so as to give the audience a sense of the books’ motifs, themes and language play,” Pence said.

She is also the author of another publication called “The Branches, the Axe, the Missing,” which is the winner of the BLP Black River chapbook prize in 2012.

Caleb Curtiss, who is an author from Champaign, will join Pence Thursday night.  He recently released a chapbook called “A Taxonomy of the Space Between Us.”

Pence said Curtiss just published his first book this month with the same publisher as her, which is Black Lawrence Press.

Stephanie White can be reached at 581-2812 or at sewhite2@eiu.edu.