October 2024 Author Events Select in-store author events are recorded by our partners at JAM Upper Valley Media. Saturday, October 5, 10am-4pm Read Between the Vines: Hot Book Autumn Edition! A Book Fair for Grown-Ups at Putnam’s Vine/Yard Offsite Event! Remember the sheer joy of walking into your school book fair with crumpled bills in your pocket and more books than you could imagine at your fingertips? Why shouldn’t you feel that way again? Visit the Norwich Bookstore’s Grown Up Book Fair hosted at Putnam Vine/Yard on October 22nd from 10am-4pm. We’ll be celebrating all things autumnal & spooky: whether you’re looking to get swept off your feet by a magical romance or kept up all night by a harrowing horror novel, we’ll have the books you need to sink into sweater season. Putnam’s Vine/Yard is located at 188 S Main St Suite 110, White River Junction, VT 05001. Monday, October 7 at 10am Story Time with Beth! In-Store Event! Calling all book-loving kids! Join us on Mondays at 10am for Read-Aloud Story Time with Beth, Bookseller and Librarian Extraordinaire! Wednesday, October 9 at 7pm Ethan Tapper How To Love A Forest In-Store Event! A tender and fearless exploration of our relationship with forests and ecosystems from forester and debut author Ethan Tapper that challenges conventional beliefs and offers a new land ethic for the modern world. This event is partnered with the Vermont Woodlands Association. Only those who love trees should cut them, writes forester Ethan Tapper. In How to Love a Forest, he asks what it means to live in a time in which ecosystems are in retreat and extinctions rattle the bones of the earth. How do we respond to the harmful legacies of the past? How do we use our species' incredible power to heal rather than to harm? Ethan Tapper is a forester and writer based in Vermont. Since 2012, he has worked as a consulting forester and service forester, managing public and private forestlands and advising thousands of landowners. Tapper leads dozens of public events each year, maintains an active social media presence, and writes a column in newspapers and a quarterly column in Northern Woodlands magazine. He has received numerous awards and distinctions, including being named Forester of the Year by the Northeast-Midwest State Foresters Alliance in 2021. Tapper manages Bear Island, his 175-acre forest and homestead in Bolton, Vermont, and plays in a punk band. Thursday, October 10 at 7pm Judith Lindbergh Akmaral In-Store Event! A nomad woman warrior on the ancient Central Asian steppes must make peace with making war. Inspired by Greek myths of Amazon women warriors and modern archaeology that proves that they were real, Akmaral follows one woman’s struggle through loyalty, love, and loss to become a leader of her people. Judith Lindbergh’s new novel, Akmaral , is about a nomad woman warrior on the ancient Central Asian steppes. Her debut novel, The Thrall’s Tale, about women in Viking Age Greenland, was an IndieBound Pick, a Borders Original Voices Selection, and praised by Pulitzer Prize winners Geraldine Brooks and Robert Olen Butler. She has spoken at and published with the Smithsonian Institution and provided expert commentary for The History Channel’s documentaries. Judith received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She is the Founder/Director of The Writers Circle, a creative writing center based in New Jersey. Monday, October 14 at 10am Story Time with Beth! In-Store Event! Calling all book-loving kids! Join us on Mondays at 10am for Read-Aloud Story Time with Beth, Bookseller and Librarian Extraordinaire! Tuesday, October 15 at 6pm The Deep Cuts Book Club Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu In-Store Event! A book club celebrating overlooked classics hosted by Emma Kaas. Meets every third Tuesday of the month. Our October pick is Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. Isolated in a remote mansion in a central European forest, Laura longs for companionship--until a carriage accident brings another young woman into her life: the secretive and sometimes erratic Carmilla. As Carmilla's actions become more puzzling and volatile, Laura develops bizarre symptoms, and as her health goes into decline, Laura and her father discover something monstrous. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's compelling tale of a young woman's seduction by a female vampire was a source of influence for Bram Stoker's Dracula, which it predates by over a quarter century. Carmilla was originally serialized from 1871 to 1872 and went on to inspire adaptations in film, opera, and beyond, including the cult classic web series by the same name. Wednesday, October 16 at 7pm Danny Brzozowski Beyond the Bounds of Infinity In-Store Event! Featuring stories by L. Marie Wood, S.A. Cosby, Jessica McHugh, and Mary SanGiovanni-alongside newer voices like Cassius Kilroy, Jessica L. Sparrow, and Vicky Velvet-Beyond the Bounds of Infinity offers a collection of weird fiction and cosmic horror stories that are diverse down to the cellular level. From Taíno folk horror to the horror of identity in a world that just doesn't understand, from cozy to apocalyptic, and everything in between, let these authors show you what fear really is, and what it means to them. Danny Brzozowski (they/them) grew up feral, between the woods of North Eastern Pennsylvania and the decaying skeletons of industry in Upstate New York. They were dubiously domesticated by the promise of unlimited books at public libraries. As a biology teacher, writer, and grassroots community organizer, Danny’s work reflects a life in dynamic equilibrium between modern empirical science and traditional ways of knowing. Tiny acts of resistance are their self-care. After sampling every biome, they have settled in central Vermont because it feels like home but the weather is better. Thursday, October 17 at 7pm Juliet Grames The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia In-Store Event! Calabria, 1960. Francesca Loftfield, a twenty-seven-year-old, starry-eyed American, arrives in the isolated mountain village of Santa Chionia tasked with opening a nursery school. There is no road, no doctor, no running water or electricity. And thanks to a recent flood that swept away the post office, there’s no mail, either. Most troubling, though, is the human skeleton that surfaced after the flood waters receded. Who is it? And why don’t the police come and investigate? When the local priest's housekeeper begs Francesca to help determine if the remains are those of her long-missing son, Francesca begins to ask a lot of inconvenient questions. As an outsider, she might be the only person who can uncover the truth. Or she might be getting in over her head. As she attempts to juggle a nosy landlady, a suspiciously dashing shepherd, and a network of local families bound together by a code of silence, Francesca finds herself forced to choose between the charitable mission that brought her to Santa Chionia, and her future happiness, between truth and survival. Saturday, October 19 at 2pm Jon Waterman in conversation with Laura Waterman Into the Thaw In-Store Event! A bestselling author and photographer returns to the Arctic after 40 years to document the changes wreaked by the climate crisis. Amidst the chaos, he reunites with the wonders of this magical -- but fragile -- ecosystem. Jon Waterman has worked as a director of a press, an editor, and a naturalist. A sought-after public speaker, his work has often appeared in The New York Times, Outside, Men’s Journal, Adventure, and Climbing. His 17 books include In the Shadow of Denali, Kayaking the Vermilion Sea, and Running Dry; he is a frequent grantee of the National Geographic. By taking risks and tackling difficult issues, his work transcends traditional outdoor yarns and has garnered numerous awards, including a Literary Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts, 3 Best Adventure Book Awards from the Banff Book Festival, a National Park Service Special Achievement Award, and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. He lives in Carbondale, Colorado. Laura Waterman has been described as “mountain royalty.” With her late husband, Guy Waterman, she has written numerous articles and books on the outdoors, including the definitive 900-page classic, Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains. The Watermans were pioneering philosophers of wilderness ethics and are often credited as the inspiration for the modern Leave No Trace movement of low-impact camping and hiking. Monday, October 21 at 10am Story Time with Beth! In-Store Event! Calling all book-loving kids! Join us on Mondays at 10am for Read-Aloud Story Time with Beth, Bookseller and Librarian Extraordinaire! Wednesday, October 23 at 7pm Ivy Schweitzer and Al Salehi Within Flesh In-Store Event! Within Flesh is an inventive conversation between two contemporary poets and Emily Dickinson about the national reckoning on race and injustice provoked by the Black Lives Matter movement. Drawing on their ancestral Muslim and Jewish traditions, as well as satire, humor and empathy, the poets craft a path “to repair the broken world,” in their book, Within Flesh. Born in Southern California, Al Salehi is a multilingual American poet and entrepreneur of Persian descent who lives in Orange County with a background in technology. Al’s poetry page can be viewed at PoetryByAlan.com. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY in a Jewish-American family, Ivy Schweitzer has lived in Vermont for many years and taught English and Women and Gender Studies at Dartmouth College. Please visit her author page: https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ivyschweitzer. Saturday, October 26 at 2pm Alison Prine and Stephen Cramer Loss and its Antonym & City Full of Fireworks & Blues In-Store Event! Join us for an evening with two acclaimed poets and the threads that ties them together: love and loss. Alison Prine’s spectacular collection, Loss and Its Antonym, sweeps across a lifetime in an attempt to find the right antonym for grief...
—BIANCA STONE, author of What Is Otherwise Infinite and Poet Laureate of Vermont. In City Full of Fireworks and Blues, Stephen Cramer collects a series of lyric poems that explore both love and loss with a taut musicality that enters the reader’s very musculature. Alison Prine’s latest collection of poems, Loss and its Antonym (Headmistress Press, 2024), won the 2023 Sappho’s Prize in Poetry and came out in March. Her debut poetry collection, Steel (Cider Press Review, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Vermont Book Award. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Five Points, Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, and others. She lives and works in Burlington, Vermont. Visit her at alisonprine.com. Stephen Cramer’s first book of poems, Shiva’s Drum, was selected for the National Poetry Series and published by University of Illinois Press. Bone Music, his sixth, won the Louise Bogan Award. His ninth, The Disintegration Loops, was a finalist for the Vermont Book Award. His most recent is City Full of Fireworks and Blues, out from Shanti Arts. He is also the editor of Turn It Up! Music in Poetry from Jazz to Hip-Hop. Cramer’s work has appeared in journals such as The American Poetry Review, African American Review, The Yale Review, and Harvard Review. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont and lives with his wife and teenager in Burlington. Monday, October 28 at 10am Story Time with Beth! In-Store Event! Calling all book-loving kids! Join us on Mondays at 10am for Read-Aloud Story Time with Beth, Bookseller and Librarian Extraordinaire! Wednesday,October 30 at 7pm Neil Shepard with Cleopatra Mathis After the Body/The Book of Failures In-Store Event! In work taken from her previous award-winning seven books of poems, Cleopatra Mathis' elegant and visceral poems addressed marriage, the mystery of animals, the indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality. The new poems in her eighth book, After the Body, chart the progress of the body's decline. In The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, alert to the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries. Cleopatra Mathis is the author of eight books of poems, including What to Tip the Boatman? Which won the Jane Kenyon Award for Poetry in 2001 and White Sea, the recipient of The New England Poetry Award in 2005, and the Sheila Motten Book Prize for Book of Dog in 2013. The most recent, After the Body: Poems New and Selected, published by Sarabande Books in 2020, was a finalist for the New England Book Award for poetry, and won the Eric Hoffer Award for Poetry. Her many awards and prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and three Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Best American Poetry, The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women, and Leaning Toward Light. The founder of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College, where she taught from 1982-2016, she lives with her family in East Thetford, Vermont. Neil Shepard’s ninth collection, The Book of Failures, came out in January 2024 from Madville Publishing. How It Is: Selected Poems, was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry (Ireland), and in 2019, he edited Vermont Poets & Their Craft (Green Writers Press, VT). His poems appear online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and Poem-a-Day, as well as in several hundred literary magazines. He founded and edited for a quarter century the Green Mountains Review, and he currently edits the online literary magazine Plant-Human Quarterly. These days, he splits his time between Vermont and NYC, where he teaches at Poets House.
Tess Holbrook Events Coordinator
