In his 1979 Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand wrote, “We are as gods, so we might as well get good at it.” Based on his time on the Mississippi River, however, Boyce Upholt concludes “that we do not make very good gods.” In the final pages of The Great River: The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi, Upholt reflects, “The river is an unappeasable god, and to react to it with fear and awe is not wrong. . . . Perhaps what people learn after thousands of years of living along one of the world’s greatest rivers is that change is inevitable, that chaos will come. That the only way to survive is to take care–of yourself and of everyone else, human and beyond.”

Boyce Upholt is a “nature critic” whose writing probes the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world, especially in the U.S. South. Boyce grew up in the Connecticut suburbs and holds a bachelor’s degree from Haverford College and an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His work has been published in the Atlantic, National Geographic, the Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among other publications, and was awarded the 2019 James Beard Award for investigative journalism. His stories have been noted in the Best American Science & Nature and Best American Nonrequired Reading series. Boyce lives in New Orleans.

Book photo courtesy of Boyce Upholt.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with local Madison author Ann Garvin.

Ann Garvin became an author at age fifty. Ann Garvin Ph.D. is a nurse, a professor, and USA Today Bestselling Author. She thinks everything is funny and a little bit sad. Ann writes stories about people who do too much in a world that asks too much from them.

Ann is the founder of the multiple award-winning Tall Poppy Writers where she is committed to helping women writers succeed. She is a sought-after speaker on writing, leadership and health and has taught extensively in NY, San Francisco, LA, Boston, and at festivals across the country and in Europe.

Lisa had Ann on Madison Book Beat in March 2024 for her book There’s No Coming Back from This which was published by Lake Union Publishing in 2024. Ann returned to the Madison Book Beat on 10/28 for her new book, Bummer Camp which was also published by Lake Union Publishing in September 2024.

It is difficult to write two fiction novels in one year, and Lisa discusses with Ann the amount of work that goes into accomplishing this.

One of the things that Lisa liked most about the previous interview with Ann was that she mentioned that a writer is an observer. Lisa has observed many things about Ann and their discussion takes a deep look at the loss of Ann’s parents, love in Ann’s life and an intense look at Ann’s writing career.

Ann teaches in the low-residency Master of Fine Arts program at Drexel University and lives in Wisconsin with her anxious and overly protective dog, Peanut. For more information, visit www.anngarvin.com. Also check out Ann Garvin’s Please Come Sit By Me blog.

Today on the show, incoming host Ella Saph speaks with the first-place winners in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. Cambridge writer Bob Wake took home the gold for his poem "Mending Ruth," and Madison poet Diya Abbas took home the prize for their poem “Al-Eashiq."

Both will present at a reading next week at the Wisconsin Book Festival, which will feature all the winners of the statewide 2024 Fiction & Poetry Contests. That reading is on Tuesday, October 29 at 7pm at Central Library.

About the guests:

Bob Wake is a writer and small press publisher in Cambridge, Wisconsin. He is the first-place winner of the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Contest, which he also won in 2017. His short stories have appeared in Madison Magazine, The Madison Review, Rosebud Magazine, and in Wisconsin People & Ideas. He is a recipient of the Zona Gale Award for Short Fiction from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.

Diya Abbas is a first-generation Pakistani poet from the Midwest. She is the first-place poetry winner in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. Her poems are featured or forthcoming in RHINO, Foglifter, Adroit, diode, The Offing, BAHR Magazine, and others. She is currently studying Creative Writing and South Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin Madison through the First Wave program. Find more of their work at diyabbas.com.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with festival director Jane Rotunda and author Jessica Calarco about her book Holding It Together, ahead of Calarco’s appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Thursday, October 17th.

Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net chronicles the devastating consequences of our DIY society and traces its root causes by drawing together historical, media, and policy analyses and five years of Calarco’s original research. With surveys of 4,000 parents and more than 400 hours of interviews across the socioeconomic, racial, and political spectrum, Calarco illustrates how women have been forced to bear the brunt of our broken system and why no one seems to care.

Jessica Calarco is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An expert on families, schools, and inequalities, and a mom of two, she is the author of multiple award-winning books and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as appeared on CNN, CNBC, NPR, and the BBC to discuss her research.

Learn more about Jessica’s book and what this year’s Book Festival has in store, and don’t forget to check out the full calendar of events here!

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with E.M. Tran on her debut novel, Daughters of the New Year (2022, Hanover Square Press).

Daughters of the New Year is a novel about the three Trung sisters and their mother. It’s also a novel about Vietnam and its long history of colonization at the hands of the Chinese, Japanese, and French. We catch glimpses of civil war and America’s devastating war in Vietnam. It’s a novel about diaspora and remembering an increasingly distant and fading homeland. It’s also a novel about New Orleans and the US South and how immigrant communities navigate their everyday lives.

E. M. Tran writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Her stories, essays, and reviews can be found in such places as the Georgia Review, Literary Hub, Joyland Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review Online, and more. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi and a PhD in English & Creative Writing from Ohio University. Born and raised in New Orleans, she returned and currently lives there with her family. She was born in the year of the Earth Snake. Currently, she is at work on her sophomore novel and also publishes a weekly newsletter about the show Gilmore Girls.

Photo courtesy of E.M. Tran

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with author Jennifer Kabat about her memoir The Eighth Moon from Milkweed Editions, ahead of Kabat’s appearance at A Room of One’s Own on Tuesday, September 10th.

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.

Jennifer Kabat’s diptych The Eighth Moon and Nightshining are being published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, and the books were supported by grants from the Silvers Foundation and NYFA. Her essays and criticism have appeared in 4 Columns, Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. She lives in rural New York, serves in her local fire department and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Kathleen Paris about her book Gentle Comforts For Women Grieving the Loss of a Beloved Life Companion.

As an author, educator, and management consultant, Paris has assisted organizations over the past thirty years to plan for new realities and improve their systems and organizational climate. She currently holds the title of Distinguished Consultant Emeritus from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Paris has consulted in the United States and internationally in Canada, Cyprus, France,

Guam, Switzerland, Virgin Islands, and the UK Kathleen lost her beloved husband Matt Cullen, of twenty-five years in 2018. She has been reaching out ever since to other grieving women.

The dedication of her book reads “To my husband, Matt Cullen the best person I ever knew.”

One of the frequently asked questions of Kathleen, is why did you write Gentle Comforts?

Kathleen’s response is that she started journaling the day her husband died and from then on wrote to him every night. The journal was the foundation of Gentle Comforts. And as the months went on, it occurred to Kathleen that she could take the worst thing that ever happened to her and help others in the same situation.Gentle Comforts for Women Grieving the Loss of a Beloved Life Companion was published by ACTA Publications in 2024. The book is organized to follow a woman-in-mourning’s experiences over time. There is journaling space with short prompt questions for each reflection. There are easy healthy recipes for one person included for each of the 50 topics. The book is written in a gentle and encouraging voice of one who has been there. So many of us have lost someone in our lives, and the hope was that this show could touch you in some way, ease your burden, and for you to know that there are so many of us struggling with our losses. Here is the Irish quote from the front of Kathleen’s book: “Death leaves a heartache no one can heal. Love leaves a memory no one can steal.”

A note from Kathleen Paris:

Friday, August 30 is National Grief Awareness Day. Every year it is on August 30.

Aimed at educating people about grief, providing resources and helping people feel less alone.

In this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with Milwaukee-based author Katharine Beutner about her Edna Ferber Award-winning novel, Killingly, which is out now in paperback from Soho Crime.

Massachusetts, 1897: Bertha Mellish, “the most peculiar, quiet, reserved girl” at Mount Holyoke College, is missing. As a search team dredges the pond where Bertha might have drowned, her panicked father and sister arrive desperate to find some clue to her fate or state of mind. Bertha’s best friend, Agnes, a scholarly loner studying medicine, might know the truth, but she is being unhelpfully tightlipped, inciting the suspicions of Bertha’s family, her classmates, and the private investigator hired by the Mellish family doctor. As secrets from Agnes’s and Bertha’s lives come to light, so do the competing agendas driving each person who is searching for Bertha. Where did Bertha go? Who would want to hurt her? And could she still be alive?

Katharine Beutner takes a real-life unsolved mystery and crafts it into an unforgettable historical portrait of academia, family trauma, and the risks faced by women who dared to pursue unconventional paths at the end of the 19th century. Katharine is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously, she taught in Ohio and Hawai`i. She earned a BA in Classical Studies at Smith College and an MA in English (creative writing) and a PhD in English literature at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first novel, Alcestis, won the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award and was a finalist for other awards, including the Lambda Literary Association’s Lesbian Debut Fiction Award.