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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. 

Stu Levitan welcomes back to the program Doug Bradley to discuss his new book The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir, just out from the good people at Legacy Book Press. And it is exactly what the subtitle promises – Doug recounting the literal soundtrack of his life, putting the seminal events of his first quarter century or so in the context of the music that  accompanied, or symbolized, those events. And since most of the events recounted took place in the sixties and seventies, it’s a pretty great 46-song setlist, which you can find on Spotify.  https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2SiTq5A3GboxJ4uTNdMGJ1 Doug spent his early childhood in Philadelphia with his parents and older doo-wop singing brother, in a house filled with music. The family moved to Ohio for two years, then the Pittsburg suburb  of Clairton, where Doug graduated from Thomas Jefferson HS in 1965, doing some party DJ work along the way, thanks to his brother’s record collection. He was admitted to Notre Dame but couldn’t afford the tuition; as a scholarship student to Bethany College in Bethany WV, Class of ’69, he was a Big Man on Campus as two-term chairman of the Social Committee , booking a lot of major pop acts. That's how he came to share a joint with the Jefferson Airplane’s Grace Slick and a drink with jazz legend Count Basie, play some pick-up hoops with Smokey Robinson’s Miracles, and hold Dionne Warwick’s hand on a tragic night in American history. He was drafted into the US Army in March 1970 and fortunately for him aced the job aptitude test and so was made an Army journalist, first domestically and then in 1970-71 at the Army’s Vietnam HQ in Long Binh. After his honorable discharge, he finally acceded to the entreaties of his high school mentor – whose interest in Doug may have been more that academic – and he received an MA in English from Washington State University in 1972. He also acceded to the entreaties of his wife, Pam Shannon, and relocated to Madison in 1974, where he was one of the first employees and later president of the community-based service center Vet’s House, which helped him work through some of his postwar issues. Pam also got him to appreciate the Grateful Dead, which gives her bonus points. Never a student at the UW, he spent more than 30 years in various communications and marketing positions there, including 15 years as director of public information at UW Extension, where his father-in-law Ted Shannon was a top administrator. He also for many years co-taught with his co-author Prof. Craig Werner a course based on their award-winning book “We Gotta Get Out of this Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War.” Doug later continued the theme, writing Who’ll Stop The Rain: Respect, Remembrance and Reconciliation in post-Vietnam America, both books the subject of a BookBeat episode in February 2020. It’s a pleasure to welcome back to Madison BookBeat the 2025 recipient of the Vietnam Veterans of America’s Excellence in Arts Award, Doug Bradley

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with Madison booksellers Mira Braneck from A Room of One’s Own, Hilary Burg from Mystery to Me, and Molly Fish from Lake City Books to see how their 2025 went.  Take a listen to learn about the new releases they loved, event highlights from the past year, recommended reads that'll keep you cozy this season, and what's in store for them in 2026. And for those still doing some holiday shopping, stick around until the end to hear their order deadlines this December! Photo by Jessica Ruscello.

WORT 89.9FM Madison · Cheryl Schiltz - When the World Falls Away Lisa Malawski talks with Cheryl Schiltz today on Madison Bookbeat, November 24, 2025. Cheryl Schiltz is no stranger to silence—but not the peaceful kind. After a reaction to antibiotics destroyed her vestibular system—the part of the inner ear responsible for balance—Cheryl was plunged into a world of disorientation, instability, and invisible suffering. Even while lying down, she felt as if she were falling through space. The noise of disability wasn’t audible—it was internal, relentless, and isolating. In her powerful book, Silencing the Noise of Disability, Cheryl shares her deeply personal journey of loss, adaptation, and transformation. With raw honesty and poetic insight, she invites readers into the lived experience of invisible disability and the groundbreaking science that helped her reclaim her life. Through her collaboration with neuroscientist Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita and the use of the BrainPort device—a tool that rerouted balance signals through her tongue—Cheryl became a living example of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself. Her story was also featured in Norman Doidge’s bestselling book The Brain That Changes Itself, but in Silencing the Noise of Disability, Cheryl tells it in her own voice. “I didn’t just learn to walk again—I learned to live again.” This book is more than a memoir. It’s a call to recognize the dignity and complexity of those living with invisible disabilities. It’s a celebration of science, spirit, and the human will to adapt.  

Stu Levitan welcomes Cary Segall  for a conversation about his engaging new book A Talk in the Woods: Voices Along the Appalachian Trail (Back Burner Books), recounting stories of the people he met along the world's longest hiking-only trail. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s, the 2,197.4-mile Appalachian Trail runs through 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. More than three million people hike segments each year; fewer than one thousand earn the designation of thru-hiker, walking the entire trail within fifty-two weeks. Cary Segall set out in 2014 to become a thru-hiker, but  soon took such enjoyment talking to his fellow hikers -- most with trail names like Deacon, Northstar, Birdman, Gearhead, Leave No Tracy, Mama Bear and the Cubs --that he took the time to interview them; every so often, he'd use the computer at a public library the trail was passing to write their stories. That slowed him down, so he only got to New York that first year; illness, injury and bad weather stymied his efforts in 2015-2017, but he finally summited in 2018. Impressive and no doubt satisfying, but nowhere near as extraordinary as what Segall, 75, accomplished on Nov. 9  – completing the Madison Marathon 26 days after a UW doctor replaced his defective aortic valve. That was on top of about 80 prior marathons in  31 states, plus a record 44 straight 20-mile Syttende Mai races. Segall began his racing and writing careers at Green Bay East High School, where he ran cross-country and was sports editor of the Hi-Light newspaper. He was also both a stringer and delivery boy for the Press Gazette, and delivered Vince Lombardi's Sunday Milwaukee Journal. Before joining the State Journal, Segall applied his UW degree in wildlife ecology as a ranger-naturalist for the National Park Service, and his UW law degree as a public interest environmental lawyer before quitting to raise his newborn son Craig, with whom he would later do much hiking.  

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Emily Mitchell about her new short story collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, now available from University of Wisconsin Press. Delightfully blending literary fiction with speculative genres, the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity somehow manage to feel as though they could take place today. In Emily Mitchell’s created worlds, as in our own, technology bewitches, especially with its ability to heighten both connections and isolation. Whether being held by a giant and comforting machine, allowing micro-drones to record one’s every moment for a year to win prize money, or choosing self-mutilation in exchange for a bionic hand, these characters navigate technological and social change. The familiar can turn unrecognizable and disorienting—sometimes in a flash, sometimes gradually. Lyrical, haunting, and often funny, these stories ask us to consider what—and who—gets left out of a seemingly utopian future of technological advancements. Finely observed, thoughtful, and vivid, Mitchell’s stories get under your skin. It’s not that the best-laid plans could lead us astray—it’s that they may already have.  Emily Mitchell, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of a collection of short stories, Viral, and a novel, The Last Summer of the World. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Sun, and elsewhere; her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Guernica. She serves as fiction editor for the New England Review. Author photo by J.M. Tyree.

Stu Levitan welcomes Margaret Mooney, editor of Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories and her wife Meg Gaines to discuss this collection of nine first-person accounts from mainly Madison-area lesbians who gave birth, adopted or came out between 1980 and 2003. Just out from the good people at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press, the collection offers many important insights into the pressures and pleasures of participating in what Newsweek magazine called "the gayby boom" in the years before the US Supreme Court recognized the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Among the well-known contributors:  Mooney, former Meteorologist-in-charge at the Madison National Weather Service and Gaines, founding emerita director of the UW Law School's Center for Patient Partnership; Community Shares of Wisconsin co-founder and retired Project Home executive director Denise Matyka and her wife, education consultant Margaret McMurray; retired Madison Police Detective Alix Olson and her late wife Martha Dixon Popp; former Dane County Judge Shelley Gaylord; former Wisconsin Historical Society Press editor-in-chief Kathy Borkowski, and Janet Wright, one of the co-founders of the Advocates for Battered Women, now known as Domestic Abuse Intervention Services.   From Left: Meg Gaines, Stu Levitan, Margaret Mooney

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie talks with author Pernille Ipsen about the new translation of her memoir, My Seven Mothers (University of Minnesota Press.) On New Year’s Eve in Copenhagen in 1972, seven women had a child together: one gave birth and six others attended. They had met a year earlier at a feminist women’s camp on a small island and now, with about twenty other women’s liberationists, they occupied three dilapidated apartment buildings in the center of Copenhagen. One became the country’s first Women’s House, the nerve center of the Women’s Movement in Denmark, and the other two were women-only communal living spaces that were Pernille Ipsen’s first home. In this intimate portrait of life during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the globe, she tells the stories of these seven women, her seven mothers. Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Ipsen captures the individuality of each of her mothers as well as the common experiences that drew them together. As she deftly reflects the practical and emotional realities of her mothers’ women-centered life, Ipsen presents an engrossing picture of intersecting lives that, half a century ago, raised questions we still grapple with today: What is a family? Who is a woman? And who gets to decide? A chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived, My Seven Mothers is an eye-opening account of the challenges and possibilities connected with liberation and radical social change during the 1970s. In this time of fierce struggles over family, sexuality, and child-rearing, it reminds us that new worlds are always possible. Pernille Ipsen was professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for fifteen years and is now a full-time writer. The Danish-language version of this book, Et åbent øjeblik (An open moment), was published in 2020 and was awarded the Montana Prize for literature, one of Denmark’s top literary prizes.

Stu Levitan welcomes Wauwatosa Mayor Dennis McBride for a conversation about his new book A City on the Edge: Pandemic, Protest and  Polarization. It's a gripping and insightful first-person account of what it was like to be the newly elected chief executive of a Wisconsin city during the twin traumas of 2020 – the onset of COVID and the murder of George Floyd.  In particular, a city with its own unique history of racial extremes – founded by east coast abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century who made it a stop on the Underground Railroad, which by the early twentieth century had passed a “sundown law” requiring nonwhites to leave before dusk. And in the 21st century, a city where a Black police officer had fatally shot three persons of color in five years, the third coming less than four months before Black Lives Matter protests rocked urban areas around the country. Wauwatosa is politically liberal, home to the state’s largest medical center, the state's busiest mall, leading manufacturers, research parks, and several college campuses. Th best thing about Wauwatosa, of course, is that Bob Dylan immortalized it as Wow Wow Toaster in lyrics he wrote in late 1961 he called “On, Wisconsin,” which Milwaukee musician Trapper Schoepp developed into an actual song. Dennis McBride is Tosa’s 17th Mayor, elected to four-year terms in 2020 and 2024.  He earned a journalism degree from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, a master’s degree in public administration from Princeton University, and a law degree from New York University, and served 24 years as a Senior and Supervisory Trial Attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Prior to his election as mayor, he served ten years on the Wauwatosa common council, including two terms as its president. He’s also a member of the UWM and Tosa East Athletics Halls of Fame.  Attentive longtime BookBeat listeners may recall the name Dennis McBride from an episode in 2022 featuring his twin brother, UW Prof. Emeritus Dr. Patrick McBride talking about his memoir as the youngest Equipment Manager and Assistant Trainer in professional sports history, “The Luckiest Boy in the World,” which Dennis helped write.  

David Michael Miller transcript Stu Levitan welcomes David Michael Miller for a conversation about his new book, The Rise of Breese Stevens Field: Madison's ballpark and the team that made it home, the Centennial Edition. You may know Breese Stevens Field today as a city, state, and national landmark at 917 East Mifflin Street, the place for professional soccer and ultimate frisbee, concerts, and community events. But once upon a time, it was the place for baseball, especially as the home field from 1926 to 1942 for the Madison Blues, five-time pennant winners in three different leagues in the 1930s, and for many other activities as well. Over its first hundred years, everything from marbles to the National Football League. It's the oldest city-owned and operated athletic field in Madison and the oldest extant masonry grandstand in Wisconsin. It bears the touch of the notable local architects Claude and Stark and the federal largesse of the New Deal and served as the backdrop to some of the most noted athletes of the 30s and 40s. It's a great Madison story which David Michael Miller tells with a verve and nerve befitting its sporty milieu, dozens of well-chosen photographs and some hard-won statistics.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie talks with author Ron Rindo about his latest novel, Life, & Death, & Giants (St. Martin's Press). Gabriel Fisher was born an orphan, weighing eighteen pounds and measuring twenty-seven inches long. No one in Lakota, Wisconsin, knows what to make of him. He walks at eight months, communicates with animals, and seems to possess extraordinary athletic talent. But when the older brother who has been caring for him dies, Gabriel is taken in by his devout Amish grandparents who disapprove of all the attention and hide him away from the English world. But it’s hard to hide forever when you’re nearly eight feet tall. At seventeen, Gabriel is spotted working in a hay field by the local football coach. What happens next transforms not only Gabriel’s life but the lives of everyone he meets. Ron Rindo is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He has published one previous novel, Breathing Lake Superior, and three short story collections. He lives in Pickett, Wisconsin.

WORT 89.9FM Madison · A Kinship with Ash: Heather Swan In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski sits down with Wisconsin poet, essayist, and environmental humanities scholar Heather Swan. A lecturer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Swan brings a unique blend of ecological insight and lyrical depth to her writing, exploring the fragile intersections between humans and the natural world. Her poetry collection, A Kinship with Ash, published by Terrapin Books, is a meditation on grief, resilience, and ecological awareness. Through vivid imagery and quiet urgency, Swan’s poems invite readers to consider their place in a world marked by environmental loss and transformation. The collection is both an elegy and call to attention—an exploration of what it means to live with reverence in a time of ecological crisis. Rather than seeking solace in an untouched wilderness, Swan’s work turns toward the overlooked and the endangered: insects, birds, ash trees, and the quiet spaces where life persists. Her writing is rooted in Wisconsin’s landscape but reaches far beyond, drawing connections between personal sorrow and planetary grief. A mother, beekeeper, and award-winning author, Swan’s reflections are informed by her deep engagement with environmental literature and her own lived experience. Her previous nonfiction book, Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, received the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award and explores the global plight of pollinators through stories of hope and activism. When not writing or teaching, Heather Swan can be found hiking, observing insects, or crafting essays that bridge science and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Aeon, Emergence, Terrain, and Minding Nature, among others. A Kinship with Ash is a lyrical reckoning with loss—both personal and ecological—and a reminder that kinship can be found in the smallest creatures and quietest places.