Readers & Writers: Six readings to add to your calendar

Mary Ann Grossmann, Pioneer Press
·6 min read

Some of the fall season’s most interesting fiction and non-fiction is here this week with six authors reading at two separate events.

Literature Lovers’ Night Out hosts novelists Peter Geye, Gretchen Anthony, Carol Dunbar and Jillian Medoff at 7 p.m. Sept. 28 at Zephyr Theater, 601 N. Main St., Stillwater, presented by Valley Bookseller. (Registration: valleybookseller.com)

Juliet Patterson and Kathryn Savage introduce their non-fiction Thursday, Sept. 29, at Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

LITERATURE LOVERS’ NIGHT OUT

Gretchen Anthony (The “Book Haters’ Book Club”) – Minneapolis author of the humorous novel “Evergreen Tidings From the Baumgartners” offers an homage to family and bookselling.

Over the Rainbow, a cozy Minnesota bookstore, is in trouble after co-owner Eliot dies. He’s always supposed that the right book can turn someone into a book lover so he started a newsletter titled The Book Haters’ Book Club with recommendations for non-readers.

After Eliot’s death, his long-time business partner Irma has decided to sell the property to a developer but she won’t tell her surprised daughters, Bree and Laney, why she’s letting go of the store where they grew up. Bree, who ditched college to follow her husband on the car racing circuit, is summoned home from California by their mother. Lanny, who works in the bookstore, had always thought she would inherit the business. Then there’s Thom, Eliot’s life partner, who discovers there isn’t much left for him if there is a sale, and wonders if Eliot really loved him.

While Irma stubbornly refuses to answer questions about selling, Laney, Bree and Thom decide to fight back by mobilizing customers and neighboring businesses.

Sometimes, the unknown narrator pops in to explain things directly to the reader. And who is writing the newsletter after Eliot dies?

This story is written with love for the characters. There’s the remembered love between Eliot and Thom. There’s love between the sisters, and love for the quirky bookstore where there are Catholic confessionals used as reading nooks (probably a nod to Louise Erdrich’s Minneapolis -based Birchbark Books). And there are lots of recommendations for good reading sprinkled throughout.

Booklist calls this novel “sparkling” and they are right.

CAROL DUNBAR (“The Net Beneath Us”) – A former actor, playwright, and coloratura soprano, Dunbar writes from a solar-powered office on the second floor of a water tower in northern Wisconsin. Her debut novel should be on everyone’s TBR list.

Elsa, who comes from a privileged background, has never been good at showing emotion or opening her heart to others. Then she meets sweet, caring Silas and realizes she has found her soulmate. Silas knows all about trees and their root-based relationships, even though he is sometimes a woodcutter. Living off the grid in a partially-completed house with their two kids, Elsa couldn’t be happier. When Silas is injured in a woodcutting accident and won’t come out of a coma, her life falls apart.

Silas dies in a scene that will shock readers, thanks to the author’s fiery writing. (This is not a spoiler.). Elsa tries to go it alone with no help, feeling that her small-town neighbors don’t like her and she will never fit in. Her only local connections are Ethan and Luvera Arnasson, nearby farmers who raised Silas and loved him as much as Elsa did. They help when they can, but it takes a year of wild grief before Elsa is ready to face life without her husband.

Told in alternate voices of the Arnassons, Elsa, and her young daughter Hester, this is a book rich in layered emotions. It speaks of trees and the land, inspired partly by the author’s experiences living off the grid.

Jillian Medoff (‘When We Were Bright and Beautiful”) – Medoff, who teaches at Georgetown University, brings an East coast vibe to this story of New York elites. Billy Quinn is a star athlete at Princeton who’s accused of raping his ex-girlfriend, which he denies. The narrator of this courtroom thriller is Billy’s sister, Cassie, who was adopted into the family. A student at Yale, Cassie has her own secret; she has been having an affair with an older man for years. Centered on Billy’s trial, this fast-paced story shows the dark side of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Peter Geye (‘The Ski Jumpers) – Minneapolitan Geye (pronounced guy) is in the middle of a long promotional tour for his novel, which evokes the joys and fears of ski jumping. A former ski jumper, Geye has written a story about love and alienation between brothers and their love for their father, a former champion jumper. The narrator is a man nearing retirement, newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, who is trying to write a book about his youth as a ski jumper. Memories flood his mind and heart.

NEXT CHAPTER BOOKSELLERS

Juliet Patterson and Kathryn Savage, Minneapolis-based writers published by local literary presses, join for a conversation at 6 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29, at Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

Patterson’s “Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide” (Milkweed Editions), is timely since September is National Suicide Suicide Prevention Month. Patterson, whose writing has been widely published, was recovering from a serious car accident in 2009 when she learned her father had taken his own life. So had her grandfathers on both sides of her family. In “Sinkhole” she writes of her struggle to make sense of these losses. She and her mother go to Pittsburgh, Kan., for her father’s funeral. The area is filled with sinkholes and abandoned claims and she carefully gathers evidence and imagines the final days of her grandfathers – one a pro-labor politician, the other a melancholy businessman.

Publishers Weekly’s praise: “Patterson’s lyrical and discerning treatment of a global ‘psychological crisis’ will keep readers transfixed.” Environmental writer Terry Tempest Williams says that “Sinkhole” is “a literary triumph…a brave, smart, and compassionate understanding of suicide. Juliet Patterson is a soaring writer…”

Kathryn Savage’s “Groundglass” (Coffee House Press) takes place atop a polluted aquifer in Minnesota where the author confronts the transgressions of U.S. Superfund sites and brownfields against land, groundwater, neighborhoods, and people. While raising a young son and caring for a father dying of a cancer with known environmental risk factors, Savage traces connections between our bodies, one another, our communities, and our ecosystem. Her publisher calls the book “equal parts mourning poem and manifesto for environmental justice.”

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