Bett Dorion Fitzpatrick grew up in Newfoundland when there wasn’t a child alive who didn’t know the story about the tragic shipwrecks of the USS Truxton and USS Pollux. In this small mining town along Canada’s craggy shores, local villagers mounted a rescue operation and carried up the cliffs the 186 U.S. servicemen who survived the shipwrecks in the midst of a blizzard in February of 1942. This history of her hometown left an indelible impression on Bett, and she returned to it as an author when she retired from teaching. She conducted interviews with eyewitnesses, dug into the historical archives, and read every published account. She came to know the story inside and out. When Bett first contacted me in 2017, she had written her manuscript in verse. Yes, verse. I loved it. Like the ballad about the shipwreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald in Lake Superior, the poetic form suited the subject matter. But I recognized how challenging it might be to sell it to a commercial or trade publisher. This was hard news to deliver to such a talented author. A bit of a unicorn, the manuscript didn’t fit easily into an identifiable niche in the market. Several memoirs in verse had done well, but there didn’t appear any recent releases based on historical events. Bett bounced back like one of those cute yellow rubber ducky bathtub toys! She had hopes that this amazing history would be kept alive in a new book for the next generation, so…
One month ago, Chelsea Hanson launched her new book The Sudden Loss Survival Guide: Seven Essential Practices for Healing Grief. Even though the global pandemic made it more challenging to celebrate and promote the book without face-to-face author events, the book is doing exceptionally well. There is a reason for that. It resonates with readers and with the circumstances we find ourselves in these days…. [Read More]
Filed Under: Book Giveaway, Chelsea Hanson, The Sudden Loss Survival Guide
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In a recent article published by The Good Men Project, David Madden decodes the military jargon “battle space” as the killing fields and suggests the military rhetoric provides a pretext for delaying or cancelling the November election. “It is not enough that the Trump government bungled the pandemic and directly caused the deaths of over a hundred thousand Americans. It is not enough that the… [Read More]
Announcing The MIT Press will publish Out of the Cave: A Natural Philosophy of Mind and Knowing by Mark Johnson and Don M. Tucker in fall 2021. From a philosopher and a neuropsychologist comes an interdisciplinary theory of knowing as embodied, embedded, enacted, and emotionally-based. Plato’s allegory of the cave trapped us in the illusion that the mind is separate from the body, from the… [Read More]
After the unexpected loss of a loved one, it is difficult to know where to turn for help and what to do next, and healing can feel like something out of reach. The Sudden Loss Survival Guide: Seven Essential Practices for Healing Grief by Chelsea Hanson provides an indispensable road map to aid those who’ve experienced a life-changing loss. While you cannot control losing a… [Read More]
Looking for something new to read? Pick up Doing Time, a timely, thought-provoking tale by Wisconsin author Christopher Kunz. Sentenced to the future by the Wisconsin Experimental Prison, identity thief Mike Newhouse is dropped into Eau Claire in 2151, a city transformed by past plagues into a sustainable, zero-growth, and highly connected society. Spied on by the men who launched his 131-year leap, Mike unwittingly… [Read More]