MyNorth News Service

(Press Release provided by National Writers Series)

TRAVERSE CITY: Join guest host Thomas Lynch at the City Opera HouseĀ in Traverse City for an interview with renowned author Bonnie Jo Campbell as part of the Traverse City National Writers Series.Ā This Northern Michigan event will take place on Tuesday, October 13.

Bonnie Jo Campbell made her mark writing mesmerizing stories and gripping novels about the dark and desperate side of country living. Her new collection of stories, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, is one of the seasonā€™s most highly anticipated books.

With gorgeously ragged prose and Campbellā€™s uncanny knack for irony, Mothers, Tell Your Daughters captures the central mysteries of life through her fierce women characters whom one reviewer likened to ā€œrusty razorbladesā€”damaged but still sharp enough to draw blood.ā€

In her celebrated 2009 collection, American Salvage, Bonnie Jo Campbell picked through the precarious, primordial territory of small-town America to reveal the gun-toting, hard-drinking lives of rural men and women on the brink.

Campbellā€™s national bestselling novel, Once Upon A River, created an unforgettable heroine in sixteen-year-old Margo Craneā€”a willful, backwoods beauty with an unflinching gaze and uncanny ability with a rifle. The New York Times described Once Upon A River as ā€œrural Michigan gothic.ā€ A National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, Campbell is now recognized as one of the countryā€™s best writers of ā€œrural noirā€ and contemporary realism.Ā Ā 

This installment of the Traverse City National Writers SeriesĀ promises a gripping conversation as it winds through Campbellā€™s literary territory of drugs, underground bunkers, neo-Nazis, the plight of working class whites, fierce women and ā€œkoburyu kobudoā€ weapons training.

Thomas Lynch, Traverse City National Writers Series Guest Host

Thomas Lynch won rave reviews when he appeared as NWSā€™s featured writerĀ in the spring of 2010. He is famously known both as an undertaker and a superbly talented poet, essayist and fiction writer. He has authored five collections of poems and three books of essays and a book of stories. His work regularly appears in the countryā€™s top magazines. Lynch has been the subject of two film documentaries: PBS’s Frontline: The Undertaking, which won the 2008 Emmy Award for Arts and Culture Documentary, and Learning Gravity, produced for BBC and based on Lynchā€™s writings.


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