Connecting writers and readers for ten years, the Fox Cities Book Festival celebrates books, ideas, stories, and community in the Fox River Valley this October. In January 2017 I joined the board and have been excited about this year’s new developments. This is the first year the festival will be held in the fall instead of the spring. The Fox Cities Reads program—one book one community—continues to be held in the spring. This year Sharon Draper’s Stella by Starlight brought the Fox Cities together to examine the history of race relations and its relevance today. The fall lineup of 50 authors and 60 events across a dozen venues throughout the Fox Cities of Neenah, Menasha, Appleton, Kaukauna, Kimberly, and Little Chute is impressive. The 2017 Book Festival celebrates its tenth year by bringing back many favorite authors, along with new authors from Wisconsin and across the country. Will Schwalbe, author of End of Your Life Book Club and his new title, Books for Living, will speak to the power and joy of books and how they help us have life’s difficult conversations. Host of the radio program, Books and Brews, Laura Vosika is author of the time travel tale, Blue Bells Chronicles. Nickolas Butler, The Hearts of Men, Benjamin Ludwig, Ginny Moon, Benjamin Percy, The Dark Net, and Laurie Halse Anderson are only a few of the authors who I’m excited to hear and see. Anderson speaks at UW-Fox Valley on October 10 on “Censorship in America: Why Are Adults so Afraid…

Looking for something to read or gift this holiday season? Here are my book recommendations for the best of 2017. None of these titles are written by my clients. Each one of these books is something I’ve enjoyed as a reader during the last year and give you my best word-of-mouth recommendation. I read four or five books a month for pleasure and these are at the top of my list for 2017.   Fiction The Twelve Mile Straight: A Novel by Eleanor Henderson It was her first novel, Ten Thousand Saints, which hooked me on Eleanor Henderson’s writing and I liked the book better than the movie. But this novel is exquisite. An American classic novel. Good to the last page. Set during the Depression in rural Georgia, this story of two young women, one white and one black, is captivating for the way it explores and exposes relationships between men and women, blacks and whites.  The creative way she carries threads of the story through the entire manuscript is worth noting. For the central plotlines, they are mythic and epic. No spoilers here. Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig This debut novel stars a young female autistic protagonist for the reader to champion. Ginny Moon tells her own story in her own words. When Ginny was taken from her birth mother, she left baby doll behind and is desperate to get it back and make things right. The Moons adopted Ginny and she is in a much less dangerous…

On Saturday morning at 9 a.m. at the Atlas Coffee Mill, three dozen Fox Cities writers filled a meeting room for a workshop with Will Schwalbe, author of End-of-Your-Life Book Club (Knopf, 2012) and editor at Macmillan. Friday afternoon there were two readings to packed houses as part of the Fox Cities Book Festival. I listened to him at UW Fox Valley where the audience spilled out of the auditorium at 1:30 p.m. He also spoke at the Neenah Public Library at 3:30 p.m. “Reading, writing, and editing are three legs of a stool,” Will Schwalbe said in his introduction Saturday morning. To write a book requires all three. Offering advice to a room full of aspiring writers, Schwalbe said you have to give yourself permission to write a crummy first draft. While he set out to write a 50-70,000 word manuscript, he wrote 150,000 words before he arrived at a final version. “Find or make the time to write,” he said. “This is perhaps the hardest part. Butt in chair.” For those writing memoir, he advised them to be authentic. Schwalbe shared Hemingway’s advice: never stop writing until you know what will come next. He suggested writers shouldn’t overlook the Melville solution: drop in chapters with necessary expository information intermittently. Figuring out what the readers need to know and when they need to know it is the hard work of writing in long form. He suggested sleep sometimes provides the solution to these kind of writing problems. Schwalbe described the…