Portrait Gallery: Caitlin Doughty

Each week, Christine Larsen creates a portrait of a new author for us. Have any favorites you’d love to see immortalized? Let us know

Friday, October 6: From Here to Eternity Reading

Caitlin Doughty is a mortician whose new book, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, “travels the world [from Bolivia to Japan to Indonesia] to discover how other cultures care for their dead.” Tonight, she’s joined by Seattle poet Sonya Vatomsky in an onstage conversation. She goes to Bolivia to see cigarette-smoking, wish-granting human skulls; to Japan to watch relatives of the deceased use chopsticks to pluck their loved ones’ bones from cremation ashes; to Indonesia to watch a man dress his grandfather’s mummified body.

The Summit, 420 E. Pike St., 322-7411, http://townhallseattle.org. $5. 21+. 7 p.m.