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On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with festival director Jane Rotonda and author Meghan O'Gieblyn about her book Will and Attention, ahead of O'Gieblyn's appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Friday, October 16th. After leaving evangelical Christianity in her early twenties, kicking an addiction, and building a life as a writer, Meghan O'Gieblyn was admired by her friends for having a strong will. Then, in her late thirties, she began secretly attending Catholic mass and meeting with a priest to discuss conversion. After eleven years of sobriety, she began drinking again. Both returns—to organized religion and to alcohol—felt to her like a regression, a personal defeat. Knowledge and determination had proven useless when it came to her most vexing personal battles. In Will and Attention, O'Gieblyn captures those perplexing days. Soon after her return to sobriety, she looked to a series of spiritual texts for answers and began putting them in conversation with her life. She was struck by the words of philosopher and mystic Simone Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.”  Will had certainly failed her; perhaps the answer lay in attention to her wandering mind and heart? Inspired by this possibility, she set out to find a spirituality that could meet her longings and prove capacious enough to hold the dark side of human nature.  Meghan O'Gieblyn is the author of Will and Attention, and the books God Human Animal Machine and Interior States. She writes essays, features, and criticism for Harper's Magazine, The New Yorker, n+1, The Point, The Baffler, Wired, The Yale Review, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, The New York Times, Bookforum and other publications. She is the recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and the 2023 Benjamin H. Danks Award from American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her essays have been included in The Best American Essays and The Contemporary American Essay anthologies.  You can see a full list of this year's Wisconsin Book Festival events here.

Stu Levitan welcomes Madison’s musical Renaissance man Ben Sidran, making his fourth appearance on Madison BookBeat, to talk about his new book Cool Cat Blues: The Life and Times of Georgie Fame (Equinox). And what a life and what times, a musical career with commercial and creative success from 1958 to 2022. Touring pianist and singer with rock and roll legends Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent at 16. Leading one of the leading British R&B group of the early sixties, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames  -- the only UK band to tour with the Motown Revue in 1965. Being the only artist to twice knock the Beatles out of the top spot on the UK music charts, with the Blue Flames and as a solo pop singer. He financed the hip Bag O’Nails Club in Soho, where Paul and Linda McCartney met at one of his gigs  and where Jimi Hendrix gave his first official London performance, featuring the drummer, Mitch Mitchell, whom Fame had recently fired.  Then he became a respected jazz singer and songwriter. In the 1990s, charter membership in former Rolling Stone Bill Wyman’s Rhythm Kings and an intense ten-years as touring musical director for Van Morrison. A big band singer so popular in Scandinavia he lived for a while in Sweden, he also toured regularly in Australia with the Aussie Flames. A discography that encompasses  14 live albums, 50 singles and 34 studio albums – including three on the Go Jazz Records label. Plus scandal and tragedy both arising from the British noblewoman Nicollete Marchioness of Londonderry, whom he married in 1972 after she bore his child while married to the Marquis of Londonderry, and who jumped off a bridge to her death 21 years later.  Quite a life for the man born Clive Powell in late June, 1943 in northwest England, Lancashire county, a land of coal mines and textile mills. And holiday camp singing contests that can send a 16-year-old apprentice cotton weaver into musical history. There’s no one better to tell Georgie Fame’s story than his friend and colleague, Madison’s own, Ben Sidran. He’s performed and recorded with Georgie, traveled with him, signed him to his Go Jazz Records label and produced three albums. To list all of Ben’s accomplishments would occupy the entire show, so I’ll just note this appearance on Madison BookBeat, follows episodes on his books The Ballad of Tommy LiPuma, about the colorful and successful  music producer; There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream, about those three things, and his memoir A Life in the Music. As George Wein, the legendary founder of the Newport Jazz and Folk Festivals and the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival once told me, “Now Ben Sidran – he writes real books.” It is always a pleasure to see, and a special pleasure to welcome to Madison BookBeat, our friend Ben Sidran.

Stu Levitan welcomes playwright Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff for a conversation about her new play, "Walt Whitman's American Dream," a featured presentation at the Capital Times Idea Fest on September 19. Presenting Whitman's life and poetry in the context of his time -- born while the Founders were still alive, he mourned Lincoln and died on the cusp of the Gilded Age --  the play invites audiences to reflect on what it means to be an American, and whether a divided people can reconnect.  And there's a good dose of Whitman's own words -- free and rhythmic, democratic and vast, sensual and erotic. (Thank you, Public Domain.) Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaff is a frequent contributor to the Washington Post, NY Times and other national media, focusing on parenting, education and health. A graduate of Northwestern University with an MFA in Acting from the University of Alabama, she also has a certificate in television news production, which she put to use as an assistant producer at the CBS News magazine 48 hours. She has also created and taught a series of courses on Shakespeare for older adults and been the managing editor for the leading provider of online cognitive assessments. She is the granddaughter of the late executive editor of the Capital Times Elliott Maraniss and Mary Maraniss, an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press, and the daughter of two-time Pulitzer Prize journalist/historian/biographer David Maraniss and his wife Linda.  Sarah's brother Andrew has also been a guest on Madison BookBeat, discussing his books on sports and society. "Walt Whitman's American Dream" is her third play. There will be a stage reading with soundscape of "Walt Whitman’s American Dream" at 5 PM on September 19 in the Memorial Union Play Circle on the UW campus. Registration for the free event is through captimesideafest.com.

On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie talks with author Chloe Benjamin about her new novel, Understory. At the end of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career, a husband, and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time? The book is now available from Putnam. Chloe Benjamin is the author of The Immortalists, a New York Times bestseller, and The Anatomy of Dreams. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick, The Immortalists was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others. The Anatomy of Dreams received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Originally from San Francisco, CA, Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband and two Maine Coon cats in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chloe will be appearing at the Central Branch of the Madison Public Library on Wednesday, September 9th.

On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by UW classics professor and author Tara Mulder to discuss her new book, A Womb of One's Own, now available from University of California Press. In the well-trod history of the Roman Empire, a pivotal moment has long gone unnoticed: It was in ancient Rome that medical men first set their sights on childbirth, the traditional domain of female midwives. Taking us to the dawn of Western obstetrics, A Womb of One's Own offers a feminist account of how, against a long tradition of midwifery, male doctors began claiming authority in reproductive matters, with an emphasis on theoretical rather than practical knowledge. Their intrusion paved the way for the later criminalization of midwives and the cloaking of childbirth in secrecy and shame. Yet communities of Roman women continued to help each other through the journey from preconception to postpartum, guided by their own experience and the expertise of midwives. Tara Mulder recovers stories of ancient women living and resisting as they sought autonomy over their bodies and their health. Recounting their experiences in vivid, intimate detail, she reveals how old our modern conflicts about birth truly are. Tara Mulder specializes in medicine, sex, and gender in antiquity, focusing particularly on the history of reproduction. She has published articles on the history and reception of reproduction, midwifery, abortion, gender and sexuality, and herbalism. Her academic trade monograph, A Womb of One’s Own: Childbirth in Ancient Rome tells a composite birth story, made up of the experiences of multiple (mostly) women. Other current projects include editing A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Ancient World for Bloomsbury, and producing a translation of Metrodora’s Conditions of the Womb, a Byzantine medical text written by a woman. She is an assistant professor in the Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies department at UW Madison. As the daughter of a homebirth midwife, she has assisted in over two dozen births.

McNally transcript Stu Levitan welcomes historian, author and music publicist Dennis McNally, whose new book is The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. And while it’s mainly about San Francisco, with a bit of New York and London thrown in, it does feature several individuals and events pertaining directly to Madison. So that’s why you get to hear about it here. Dennis’s first book was include Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; then came  A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, which he wrote after serving many years as the band’s publicist; and in 2015 the award-winning On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, tracking American music from minstrelsy to Bob Dylan. He also edited Jerry on Jerry, transcripts of conversations he had over the years with Jerry Garcia. Here’s our conversation about The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.

On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Lisa Fishman to talk about her deubt novel, Write Back Now! Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishman’s debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they don’t. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real. It is now available from Guernica Editions. Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Rupture, Guesthouse, Flash Boulevard, and Jerry Jazz Musician. A nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, including One Big Time; 24 Pages & other poems; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; The Happiness Experiment; and Dear, Read. Her poetry is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Fence Books’ Not for Mothers Only. With origins in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Wisconsin and Eastern Canada. Write Back Now! is her first novel. You can learn more about Lisa on her page at Wave Books

Stu Levitan welcomes Nancy Kathman, for a conversation about her engaging new memoir, “Love, Cuba, Goats and Music,” about her life cutting sugarcane in Cuba, co-founding the Southwest Dairy Goat Cooperative and exploring world music with the late Bob Queen, founder of so many of the hallmark east side music festivals.

On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Sahar Mustafah to talk about her new novel, The Slightest Green. In the middle of dinner one evening, Intisar Jaber receives a phone call that will upend her quiet life in Chicago: her father is dying and she must go to Palestine to pay her final respects. But Intisar hasn't seen or heard from Hafez for nearly two decades, ever since he abandoned her and her mother to join the resistance. After a fateful mission, Hafez was thrown into the notorious Gahana Prison to serve a life sentence—permanently removed from her life. As soon as Intisar arrives in his village of Bayt al-Hawa, she discovers what it means to be a stranger in her ancestral land, the inheritance of loss, and the high price of freedom. Meanwhile, Hafez’s mother Sundus battles to save the home that she built with her husband from thieving hands. Will Intisar, her estranged granddaughter, help Sundus fight to reclaim it? Can they close the gaping distance between them before it’s too late? The daughter of immigrants, Sahar Mustafah explores her Palestinian heritage in her writing. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Columbia College where she was a Follett Graduate Scholar. Her debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, was named a The New York Times Book Review Notable Books of 2020 and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was a Finalist for the 2021 Palestine Book Award, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, and chosen for the Los Angeles Times “United We Read.” Her recent fiction is featured in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction and The View from Gaza published in The Massachusetts Review. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from New Literary Project and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. Mustafah writes and teaches outside of Chicago. Sahar will be in town to discuss The Slightest Green at A Room of One’s Own on May 17th.

Jeff Oloizia was our guest on Book Beat with John Quinlan discussing his new weekly WI Literary Podcast "Writing Forward," which debuted on May 6th. We learned about the purpose of the cutting edge podcast, and about the man behind it. The Brookfield native and 2007 UW alum left Wisconsin post-graduation, not necessarily expecting to return, settling into "an itinerant existence" in exotic places like Japan, San Francisco and New York as a journalist, and eventually earning a professorship as part of graduate studies in Wilmington, North Carolina. (This included a stint as an editor at the New York Times.) As reported in this week's Cap Times, he once thought he had leave Madison to live a life of literature. “It felt important to leave and go to the places where I thought writers were,” Oloizia said. After more than a dozen years interviewing famous people in these exotic locales, he returned home to Madison in 2020 to write extraordinary stories about the Wisconsin everyman as a prolific contributor to publications like Madison Magazine. And this week, he creates a literary podcast interviewing Wisconsin authors walking a similar path back to their own roots here. A fascinating show about a fascinating guy. New editions of "Writing Forward" are available each week wherever podcasts are available. For more on Jeff, his podcast, and the overall scope of his work, visit his website at www.jeffoloizia.com .   Photo courtesy of Jeff Oloizia

Stu Levitan welcomes author and editor Dean Robbins, for a discussion about his career writing illustrated books for children – 13 of them at last count, inspirational stories about such role models as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., polio-eradicator Dr. Jonas Salk, NASA computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, the young Pakistani Noble Laureate Malala Yousafzai, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, suffrage leader Alice Paul, human rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, astronaut Alan Beam , and more.  Dean’s books have been favorably reviewed in the New York Times and Daily News, USA Today, the Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Forbes magazine, along with the Madison, Milwaukee and Wisconsin statewide media.     Steady BookBeat listeners will recall Dean’s appearance last July for a conversation about his first book for adult readers, Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World, And Me, from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Longtime Madisonians may remember Dean as the arts editor for Isthmus from 1991 to 2008, when he succeeded Marc Eisen as editor. Dean moved to the UW in 2014 as Communications Director for the Division of Continuing Studies and since 2019 has been editor of the alumni magazine On Wisconsin. It was a pleasure to welcome him back to Madison BookBeat.

Author Theresa Evans of Sturgeon Bay discusses important end of life issues around her support of her mother in experiencing Assisted Death.  "Choosing to Die: A Daughter's Story Of Supporting Her Mother's End Of Life Through Assisted Death," is about the journey her family took once her mother decided to define the date and terms of her death in the context of a small southwestern Ontario town. Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, has been legal in Canada since 2016.  By 2023, over 60,000 Canadians had chosen to die this way.  By contrast, the United States has some of the most restrictive laws in the world around MAID.   Canada allows a physician to administer the medications that will end a human life, often intravenously.   However, in the US, one must be able to ingest the medication on their own, which can add additional stress and danger.  For example, what if a person can't swallow, or if they vomit back the medication?  What if because of the difficulties they face in attempting to die on their own, they lapse into a coma and don't die?  Evans maps out what a more compassionate, patient-empowering approach in the US could mean. Presented like a journal, Evans uses the metaphor of her mother's garden to powerful effect. Choosing to Die describes the author's vivid first hand experience, and is useful for caregivers, death doulas, and other professionals and volunteers involved in hospice care and palliative care.  Mos of all, Choosing to Die is a gift for anyone seeking clarity and compassion in the midst of one of life's most confounding decisions.

On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Lisa Low to talk about her new poetry collection, Replica. Stand-up comedy, a celebrity non-apology, observations of racism, and the slipperiness of nostalgia underpin Replica. In poignant, witty poems, Lisa Low navigates the tensions of solidarity and hostility in white spaces as she sets out to write differently about race. “The problem of being with a white man is also a problem of writing,” Low says in a prose poem that turns writing about identity on its head. She peers in from outside the poem, as if through an open ceiling. The poem itself becomes a site of investigation—a counterpoint to constricting narratives about Asian American identity—reimagined as a dollhouse, a stage with props, an image the speaker wears like a bodysuit. Replica asks what it means to represent yourself and your experiences in a world where you are indistinguishable from others. Lisa Low is the author of Crown for the Girl Inside, winner of the Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest from YesYes Books. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, and her poems have appeared in Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Massachusetts Review, Poetry, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Chicago. Cover design by adam bohannon, with art by Yuqing Zhu

On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Douglas Metoxen Kiel to talk about their new book, Unsettling Territory. How did the Oneida Nation of northeastern Wisconsin—stripped of nearly all its reservation lands by the early twentieth century—rise to become a powerful political and economic force in Native America and the present-day Midwest? Doug Kiel traces the journey of resurgence, adaptation, and nation rebuilding of the Oneida people, who navigated federal policies and socioeconomic shifts to chart their own future, transforming adversity into opportunity. Kiel shows how Oneidas harnessed New Deal programs to advance their goals of self-determination; how urban migration, often seen as a marker of Indigenous displacement, became a tool of community empowerment; and how the Nation has reclaimed land and authority despite predictable backlash from neighboring towns. Drawing on extensive archival records, family photographs, and oral histories—including stories from his grandmother—Kiel highlights the everyday acts that have sustained the Oneida Nation across generations and offers vital insights into the broader fight for Indigenous nationhood in twenty-first-century America. Doug Kiel, a citizen of the Oneida Nation, is associate professor of history at Northwestern University. They live in Chicago, IL.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Melissa Faliveno about her debut novel, Hemlock, now available from Little, Brown. Sam, finally sober and stable with a cat and a long-term boyfriend in Brooklyn, returns alone to Hemlock, her family’s deteriorating cabin deep in the Wisconsin Northwoods, where her mother disappeared years before and never returned. But a quick, practical trip takes a turn for the worse when the rot and creak of the forest starts to creep in around the edges of Sam’s mind. It starts, as it always does, with a beer. As Sam dips back into the murky waters of dependency, the inexplicable begins to arrive at her door in the forms of a neighbor who leaves no trace, a talking doe who sounds just like Sam’s missing mother, and a series of mysterious gifts that might be a welcome or a warning. And as Sam’s stay extends—as the town’s grip on her tightens and her body takes on a strange new shape—the borders of reality begin to blur, and she senses she is battling something sinister—whether nested in the woods or within herself. Melissa Faliveno is the author of the essay collection Tomboyland, named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, New York Public Library, Oprah Magazine, Electric Literature, and Debutiful, and recipient of a 2021 Award for Outstanding Literary Achievement from the Wisconsin Library Association. Her essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in Esquire, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Literary Hub, among many others. A first-generation college graduate, Melissa received a BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently the Margaret R. Shuping Fellow and assistant professor of creative writing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.