The fifth annual Wisconsin Book Festival is a five-day celebration in and around downtown Madison this week, October 18-22, including the events described below among many others. Visit their website for a Full schedule of events, including events on science, nature, and the environment.
A program of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, it is the state’s largest literary festival, with approximately 10,000 annual attendees, and one of the largest in the nation. Designed to delight booklovers of all walks, tastes, and ages, the Festival features readings, lectures, book discussions, writing workshops, live interviews, children’s events, and more.
Saturday, October 21 4:00 - 5:20 PM
Venue: Wisconsin Historical Society-Library Mall
Presenter(s): Nick Lichter, Laurie Hovell McMillin, Marcia Bjornerud
Landscapes can scarcely be understood apart from the stories we tell of them. Three authors place themselves in the landscape, then look outward to discover the stories that the land and people tell of themselves. Laurie Hovell McMillin’s memoir, Buried Indians: Digging Up the Past in a Midwestern Town, explores a struggle over the authenticity of Indian mounds above her hometown of Trempealeau, WI, illuminating that conflict through the stories local people tell of it. Nick Lichter canoed the Mississippi in 1991, stopping and researching the river’s history in communities along the way. The Road of Souls recounts stories of places, their names, and his own journey through history and the river’s landscapes. When a geologist listens to the stories the earth can tell, the quietest landscape may speak of violence and cataclysm. Marcia Bjornerud weds science and storytelling to give voice to the planet’s formation and the delicate balance through which life is maintained or threatened.
Bookseller: Wisconsin Historical Society
Category(s): Nature, Nonfiction, Wisconsin Ties
Saturday, October 21 5:30 - 6:50 PM
Venue: Wisconsin Historical Society-Library MallPresenter(s): Lynne Heasley, John Hildebrand, Gregory Summers
Conflicts over the way people live, work, and make changes in the environments that we share are inevitable: economics, cultural assumptions, legal issues, and forces of nature all factor in.
In A Thousand Pieces of Paradise: Landscape and Property in the Kickapoo Valley, Lynne Heasley explores a region of Wisconsin where soil erosion led to environmental disaster in the 1930s, and thence to government flood control efforts that forced families to give up farms for a dam project that was ultimately scrapped.
Gregory Summers examines conflicts on the other side of the state, in the Fox River Valley, where the clash between the environmental effects of using natural resources and the interest in nature in its own right began more than fifty years ago when citizens began to question the effects of the paper industry on the river in their backyard.
John Hildebrand’s Northern Front: New and Selected Essays takes the reader from the Midwest to Alaska, from Hmong immigrants and their neighbors who come into conflict over hunting grounds, to a battle between indigenous plants and invasive species. These stories reveal intricate tensions between people about places and between people and the natural world itself.
Bookseller: Wisconsin Historical Society
Category(s): Nature, Nonfiction, Wisconsin Ties