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Join us for an afternoon with two local authors Jill Swenson and LJ Baker.
Jill will read a short excerpt from her memoir, The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods, and will be in conversation with Laura Jean Baker, author of The Motherhood Affidavits.
For fans of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, The Land of Everlasting Sky is a compelling memoir about how land connects us all—and how, if we are to mend our relations to each other and the earth, we must first reckon with our past. As the descendant of Swedish immigrants who homesteaded on what had been Red Lake Reservation, Jill Swenson returned to where her mother grew up on Lake of the Woods after she died to discover the descendants of Kakageesick, an Ojibwe spiritual leader Jill had met as a child, had been dispossessed of their great-grandfather's allotment in 2012.
JILL SWENSON
Jill D. Swenson grew up in the Twin Cities and moved to Wisconsin in high school. She graduated from Lawrence University and earned an MA and PhD from The University of Chicago before going on to teach journalism and media studies at the University of Georgia-Athens and earn tenure at Ithaca College. For a decade she lived off the grid on a small-scale sustainable farm in upstate New York; now she lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she works as an editor and literary consultant, belongs to a curling club and a poetry group, and enjoys walking her dog.
LAURA JEAN BAKER
Laura Jean earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and taught creative writing and literature for 20 years at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. In 2018, she published The Motherhood Affidavits (The Experiment; New York, NY), which won the Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award. Her short essays have appeared in WaPo, ScaryMommy, Shondaland, Salon, and The Progressive. She now works as a legal assistant at Ulrich Law, her husband’s criminal defense practice, and is quietly working on a series of picture books for children as well as a family memoir. Laura Jean has five children, three dogs, a cat, and six hens. She almost always thrives in the chaos but treats herself to little getaways at her cottage in Waupaca when the muse calls.
Join us for an afternoon with two local authors Jill Swenson and LJ Baker.
Jill will read a short excerpt from her memoir, The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods, and will be in conversation with Laura Jean Baker, author of The Motherhood Affidavits.
For fans of the PBS series Finding Your Roots, The Land of Everlasting Sky is a compelling memoir about how land connects us all—and how, if we are to mend our relations to each other and the earth, we must first reckon with our past. As the descendant of Swedish immigrants who homesteaded on what had been Red Lake Reservation, Jill Swenson returned to where her mother grew up on Lake of the Woods after she died to discover the descendants of Kakageesick, an Ojibwe spiritual leader Jill had met as a child, had been dispossessed of their great-grandfather's allotment in 2012.
JILL SWENSON
Jill D. Swenson grew up in the Twin Cities and moved to Wisconsin in high school. She graduated from Lawrence University and earned an MA and PhD from The University of Chicago before going on to teach journalism and media studies at the University of Georgia-Athens and earn tenure at Ithaca College. For a decade she lived off the grid on a small-scale sustainable farm in upstate New York; now she lives in Appleton, Wisconsin, where she works as an editor and literary consultant, belongs to a curling club and a poetry group, and enjoys walking her dog.
LAURA JEAN BAKER
Laura Jean earned an MFA from the University of Michigan and taught creative writing and literature for 20 years at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. In 2018, she published The Motherhood Affidavits (The Experiment; New York, NY), which won the Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award. Her short essays have appeared in WaPo, ScaryMommy, Shondaland, Salon, and The Progressive. She now works as a legal assistant at Ulrich Law, her husband’s criminal defense practice, and is quietly working on a series of picture books for children as well as a family memoir. Laura Jean has five children, three dogs, a cat, and six hens. She almost always thrives in the chaos but treats herself to little getaways at her cottage in Waupaca when the muse calls.