Join us on Tuesday, February 22nd at 7 PM EST (4 PM PST, 3 PM Alaska) for a reading and conversation featuring Amy Butcher and Brendan Jones. Amy will read from her new memoir, Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America, and Brendan will read from his latest novel, Whispering Alaska. Together they will consider Alaska as a site of self-discovery and inspiration. We welcome questions from the audience!
Amy Butcher is an award-winning essayist and author of Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America, (Little A, 2021), a book that interrogates the realities of female fear, abusive relationships, and America’s quiet epidemic of intimate partner violence set against the geography of remote, northern Alaska. The book earned critical praise from Publisher's Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, The Wall Street Journal, Good Morning America, CBS News, The Chicago Review of Books, The Oxford Review of Books, Booklist, and others. She earned her MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program and is the Director of Creative Writing and an Associate Professor of English at Ohio Wesleyan University. She lives in Ohio with her three rescue dogs, beautiful beasts.
Visit Amy’s website here.
Purchase Mothertrucker here.
Born in Colorado, raised in Philadelphia, Brendan Jones attended Columbia and Oxford Universities. He has been a MacDowell Fellow, as well as a resident at the Anderson Center, Caldera, and Ragdale. He worked eleven years as general contractor, starting Greensaw Design & Build, guiding Pennsylvania’s first LEED Platinum reconstruction. He continues to carpenter and commercial fish in Alaska, and also teaches philosophy and creative writing at University of Alaska, Irkutsk Technical University in Russia, and Stanford University, where he was a 2013-15 Wallace Stegner Fellow. He has published work in The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, GQ, Smithsonian, Patagonia, Ploughshares, Fine Woodworking, National Fisherman, Narratively, The Seattle Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Narrative Magazine, and recorded commentaries for NPR. His novel The Alaskan Laundry, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, won the 2017 Alaskana prize, and was longlisted for the Center of Fiction debut prize. He recently returned from Siberia, where he spent a year with his family as a Fulbright Scholar. His novel, Whispering Alaska, published with Penguin/Random House in October 2021, received a starred review from Booklist. He lives in Sitka, with his wife and three daughters.
Visit Brendan’s website here.
Purchase Whispering Alaska here.
Birch Bark provides editing at all levels, coaching services, and Mix & Meet writing groups, as well as our InConversation events with emerging and established authors. Reach out to us! We want to hear from you: BirchBarkEditing@gmail.com.
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