by Grant Cousineau As of this writing, the Australia “megafire” has burned over 17.9 million acres, larger than the area of West Virginia. It’s claimed the lives of nearly 30 people, more than 1.25 billion animals, and destroyed more than 2,000 homes. The air in Sydney has gotten so bad that breathing it has been compared to smoking 37 cigarettes. Wisconsin’s no stranger to dangerous fires. On October 8, 1871, the Peshtigo Fire burned 1.2 million acres of Northeast Wisconsin,… [Read More]
Tag » UntitledTown
#BookTalk: Margaret Atwood delivers one of the most important books of 2019
by Grant Cousineau Since the publication of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers have spent thirty-five years asking Margaret Atwood one question: “And then what happened?” Written on trains, ships, and park benches, The Testaments is, at long last, her response. Winner of the 2019 Man Booker Prize, named the Best Book of 2019 by Amazon and the Best Fiction Book of 2019 by Goodreads, this sequel picks up the story fifteen years after the original events, and it manages to deliver… [Read More]
Coming to UntitledTown April 23-26, 2020
It’s the moment we’ve all been waiting for – getting to share with you some of the folks that are coming to UntitledTown this April: CHILDREN’S/YOUTH According to Malcom Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours to become a master at something, and Rosemary Wells started putting in those hours at the age of two. She says that she was up “at least three hours very night of my young life, drawing, copying, learning and drawing more.” Whether or not the… [Read More]
#BookTalk: Suicide Woods by Benjamin Percy
by Grant Cousineau Aokigahara, also known as the Sea of Trees, is located on the northwestern flank of Mount Fuji. The area became associated with suicide in the 1960s and more popularized in 1993 after the publication of Wataru Tsurumi’s Complete Manual of Suicide, which declared that its dense trees and dearth of wildlife made it the perfect, quiet place to die. The New Yorker highlighted the forest in a 2013 profile about Japan’s suicide culture, which inspired the title-story… [Read More]
UntitledTown Earns Grant from Green Bay Packers Foundation
by Grant Cousineau On Wednesday, December 4, the Green Bay Packers Foundation awarded a record $1 million in grants to aid 192 civic and charitable groups throughout the state of Wisconsin. This year, we at the UntitledTown Book and Author Festival were honored to be chosen as one of those recipients. The recipient groups were guests at a luncheon in the Lambeau Field Atrium, which honored the outstanding efforts and services performed by each of the organizations. Last year, $800,000… [Read More]
Community: Finding My People
by Ami Maxine Irmen As a Bear fan (sorry, folks…I grew up near Chicago) who (until recently) didn’t like beer and doesn’t eat meat (yes, yes, I do miss a good brat on the Fourth), I have at times felt out of place in the city of Green and Gold (and beer and brats). Don’t get me wrong – I love Green Bay. With all my heart. There is literally nowhere else I’d rather live. (Ok, well, maybe the… [Read More]
Ten Top Talents of UntitledTown 2020 Book Festival to be Revealed December 18
UntitledTown, the Book and Author Festival that welcomed a puppeteering Margaret Atwood will reveal ten of its 2020 Festival headliners on December 18 at Lion’s Mouth Bookstore, 401 N Washington St Ste 107, Green Bay, WI 54301. The announcement is expected to include bestselling novelists, award-winning slam poets, a beloved children’s series author, an NPR science podcaster — and the Festival’s youngest-ever headliner, a middle-schooler who has achieved viral and international fame. The Top Ten Talents announcement event takes place… [Read More]
What The Handmaid’s Tale Can Teach Us 35 Years Later
by Grant Cousineau Remember in 2015 when we all took a moment to decide whether or not we’d reached Back to the Future II status? All things considered, we didn’t end up too far off. While we didn’t get flying cars or fax machines in every room, 2015 did bring us video calls, wearable technology, and news updated in real time. (And somehow, it was only a year off in predicting the Cubs would break their World Series curse. Not… [Read More]
Don’t step on a crack…
an interview with Laura Schley by Ami Maxine Irmen A few years ago, I had the chance to sit through a panel that discussed the idea of poetry in unexpected places. It included everything from making temporary tattoos to Pop Up Poets (PUP). PUP, based in New York City, enters spaces as everyday citizens and then erupts into poetic verse, creating audiences everywhere from the Q train to the local Whole Foods. The idea of bringing poetry into the… [Read More]
NaNoWri-what?
by Ami Maxine Irmen It’s November first – which means that writers all over the world are starting to count words. 50,000 words to be exact. NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month, has taken place every November since 1999 with the challenge to write a new novel of at least 50,000 words in just thirty days. The goal of this month is not perfection. In fact, the goal is to tell your internal editor to take a hike –… [Read More]