Beth Dooley

SORRY, THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT.

This event is co-sponsored by Forage.

How do we become at home in the world? By cultivating a deep relationship with our food, our farmers, our family, and the land. In foraging for goodness we look to traditional foodways as well as innovative technology to create a regenerative landscape that nourishes and delights. Dooley will impart an understanding of and appreciation for the New Agricultural Land Ethic.

Attendees will have the opportunity to hear Dooley and sample her cooking.

Schedule:

• 4:00 - 4:30 p.m. arrival, meet Beth Dooley, and enjoy wine from Forage’s cash bar

• 4:30 - 6:00 p.m. Enjoy a sampling of author Beth Dooley’s locally sourced recipes carefully prepared by Forage’s Chef Michelle Thiede, and served family style. Learn about Beth’s current research focused on perennial plants, cover crops, woody agriculture, and artisan grains.

TICKETS INFORMATION:
Tickets are $20 for this combined literary/food event.

Space Limited to 75 participants.

>> Our book sales committee will have copies of In Winter’s Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.

BETH DOOLEY has covered the local food scene in the Northern Heartland for thirty years: she writes for the Taste section of the Star Tribune, and appears regularly on local television and radio. She co-authored The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen with Sean Sherman, winner of the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook.  Other titles include: Savory Sweet: Preserves from a Northern Kitchen, In Winter’s Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland, Minnesota’s Bounty: The Farmers Market Cookbook, The Northern Heartland Kitchen, and Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, coauthored with Lucia Watson.

bethdooleyskitchen.com

ecWIT (Eau Claire Women in Theater)

SORRY, THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT.

The ecWIT gals are back by popular demand for a reader’s theater performance of adapted excerpts from a sampling of this year’s festival authors.  Without costumes or elaborate props, the stripped-down performance is sure to add a whole new dimension to the festival’s characters and stories.

This event is FREE, but a ticket is required.

ecWIT, composed of Debbie Brown, Beverly Olson, Sue Fulkerson, Kathleen Sullivan, Ann Pearson, and Sara Bryan, presents the art form of dramatic reader’s theater, enlivening literature in a variety of genres without sets, costumes, or props. Since the group’s inception in January 2016, they have become a local favorite, having received commissions to perform from Chippewa Valley Learning in Retirement, the Waldemar Ager Association, and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, to name a few. 2019 will be the third year that ecWIT has participated in the Chippewa Valley Book Festival, providing a unique experience of adapted excerpts from the works of festival authors.

ecwit.weebly.com | Facebook

B.J. Hollars

SORRY, THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT.

This event is co-sponsored by Forage.

Enjoy the opportunity to meet and mingle with some of our festival authors with delicious food ahead of B.J. Hollars’s presentation: Things that Go Bump When You Write: On Monsters, Martians, and the Search for the Truth in the Strange.

Part memoir and part journalism, Hollars’ latest book, Midwestern Strange, offers a fascinating, funny, and quirky account of flyover folklore. By confronting monsters, Martians, and a cabinet of curiosities worth of strange phenomena in our own backyards, Hollars challenges readers to look beyond their presumptions and acknowledge that just because something is weird doesn’t mean it’s wrong. A little bit X-Files, a little bit Ghostbusters, and a whole lot Sherlock Holmes, Hollars will describe his efforts to get to the bottom of many of our most tangled tales.

SCHEDULE:

• 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Meet some of our authors, enjoy a fall buffet and a cash bar, along with water and lemonade.

• 7:00 p.m. Remarks and Introductions

• 7:15 p.m. Hollars will present “Things that Go Bump When You Write”

TICKET INFORMATION:
Tickets are $35 and will include a fall buffet prepared by Forage’s Chef Michelle Thiede and a cash bar.

Space Limited to 80 participants.

>> Our book sales committee will have copies of newly released Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians and the Weird in Flyover Country available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.

B.J. HOLLARS is the author of several books, including his latest, Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians and the Weird in Flyover Country. Hollars is the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Nonfiction, the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize, the The Wisconsin Writers Awards’s Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award , and the Society of Midland Authors Award. He is the founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild and an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He lives a simple existence with his wife, their children, and their dog.

Kim Brooks

Changing patterns in family structure, rampant consumerism, and social panics spawned by the 24-hour news cycle have transformed child-rearing from an inherently private relationship into an all-consuming, competitive sport. Building on her own harrowing experiences, Brooks will reveal how expectations of parents have changed over the course of a single generation and how these expectations—fueled by fear rather than reality—pressure mothers to report one another. She will also share a fresh perspective on parenting and parenthood that shifts the focus away from individual parents to a broader social and historical perspective, highlighting the ways children can benefit from freedom and independence.  

Tickets are required for this FREE event.

>> Our book sales committee will have copies of Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.

KIM BROOKS is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of numerous fellowships. Her writing has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Chicago Magazine, and Salon. Brooks has spoken as a guest on CBS This Morning, PBS NewsHour, 20/20, NPR’s All Things Considered, Good Morning America, and The Brian Leher Show, as well as podcasts such as Note to Self, Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Femsplainer, and Matt Lewis and the News. Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear was designated A Best Book of 2018 by National Public Radio.

kabrooks.com

Adam Regn Arvidson

SORRY, THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT.

This event is co-sponsored by the Chippewa Valley Museum.

Adam Regn Arvidson takes a look not only at the Midwest plants and animals on the endangered species list but at which ones we value, why we value them, and what we should take into consideration moving forward. During this interactive discussion and reading about endangered plants and animals in the upper Midwest, you will learn which species are endangered, the history of their conservation and protection in this country, and what you can do to help these fellow inhabitants of our beautiful planet.

• 12:00 p.m. Lunch (ticket required) Lunch will be catered by French Press and will include vegetarian and gluten free options. Lunch will include a wrap, chips and a cookie. Coffee and apple cider will be provided.

• 12:30 p.m. Program (free event)

MEAL TICKETS:
Tickets are $15.
Limit of 50 participants for the lunch event.

>> Our book sales committee will have copies of Wild and Rare: Tracking Endangered Species in the Upper Midwest available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.

ADAM REGN ARVIDSON is a landscape architect and writer living in Minneapolis. His written work has been featured in magazines ranging from Landscape Architecture and Metropolis to Michigan Quarterly Review and Utne Reader. He is currently the director of strategic planning at the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. His most recent book, Wild and Rare: Tracking Endangered Species in the Upper Midwest, is a look at the landscape of the upper midwest through the lens of endangered plants and animals.

www.adamregnarvidson.com

John Hildebrand

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Inspired by a mythic Round River, John Hildebrand set off in a small boat to rediscover his home state of Wisconsin. The result was a journey through a forgotten America—a land of great physical beauty but with struggling small towns and divided loyalties. From the broad and hard-working Mississippi to the wild and slender waters of Tyler Forks, Hildebrand searches for the values that connect us—neighborliness, a sense of fairness, and a belief in the common good. The program will combine photographs, discussion, and short excerpts from the book as Hildebrand shares the sense of both wonder and belonging he discovered through his travels.

>> Hildebrand is debuting this book at the festival. Our book sales committee will have copies of Long Way Round : Through the Heartland by River available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.

John Hildebrand is the author of five nonfiction books: the award-winning Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family, Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon, and two collections of essays: A Northern Front: New and Selected Essays and The Heart of Things: a Midwestern Almanac. His latest book, Long Way Round: Through the Heartland by River, will be released at the festival. His articles and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Audubon, Outside Magazine, Sports Illustrated, GEO, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and The Missouri Review. He has won the Minnesota Book Award for Science and Nature writing and was awarded the Council of Writers' Blei-Derleth Award.