Lee Meitzen Grue and Susan Tucker, editors of a new anthology titled Mending for Memory: Sewing in Louisiana, will discuss the book at 7 p.m. on Thursday, oct. 26 at the East Bank Regional Library, 4747 W. Napoleon, Metairie.

The contributors of this anthology are seamstresses, tailors, sewers, beaders, knitters, quiltmakers, and weavers. They describe an exuberance for the stitch, the knowledge that the a lot can be solved by creativity with cloth, and the benefits of skills that make them content enough in well-lived lives.

They are resourceful in their everyday pursuits, or as contributor Martha McFerren writes, they find that sewing is “a useful beauty.”

Another contributor Arthur Pfister says that the world spins around on “thimbles, pins, needles, tape measures, rulers, ribbons, scissors, spools of thread, yards of material from bolts of fabric of all patterns ‘on account’ from Mr. Levine (the rag man), zippers, buttons, and notions of all manner and stripes . . . from Krauss, McCrory’s, Woolworth’s, and Maison Blanche Annex.”

This is the universe of people who sew, especially those in Louisiana.

The subtitle reveals the various genres of contributions: essays, both academic and personal, stories, poems, and images. The book is an anthology of pieces, most never before published. The authors and artists depict a world not often found in books.

Lee Meitzen Grue is a poet and a writer and long time editor of the New Laurel Review.

Susan Tucker is an archivist and editor whose works include Telling Memories Among Southern Women (1988) and other books on material culture and women’s education.