Episode 180 - Travels with Chris, Emily, and Charley

Episode One Hundred Eighty Show Notes
KEY: CW = Chris Wolak and EF = Emily Fine

– Giveaway News –
Every tenth episode we give books away! We have two books this time: Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly and Night Flight to Paris by Cara Black. To be automatically entered to win, become a newsletter subscriber by May 1st. The upcoming Patreon giveaway is The Dig by Anne Burt. To be automatically entered to win, become a Patreon by May 15th.

– Currently Reading – [4:14]
Writing for Impact: 8 Secrets from Science That Will Fire Up Your Readers’ Brains – Bill Birchard (CW)
Follow this link to find his articles on Psychology Today.
The East Indian – Brinda Charry (EF)
Creating Rain Gardens: Capturing the Rain for Your Own Water-Efficient Garden – Cleo Woelfe-Erskine and Apryl Uncapher (CW)
Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives – Robert D. Richardson with a foreword by Megan Marshall (EF)

– Just Read – [13:15]
The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us about Love, Life, and Mortality – Karen Fine, DVM (EF)(audio)
Chase of the Wild Goose – Mary Gordon (CW)
Summer Stage – Meg Mitchell Moore (EF) release date 5/23/2023
Travels with Charley in Search of America – John Steinbeck (CW)(EF)(audio)

– Episode Sponsor – [38:14]
Episode 180 is sponsored by The Peak Experiment. Learn more about Diana here.

– Biblio Adventures – [39:03]
Emily started listening to the Women’s Prize for Fiction podcast. So far she has listened to Season 5, Episode 12, with Maggie O’Farrell who recommended Where the God of Love Hangs Out Amy Madeline Season 5, Episode 15 Madeline Miller recommended Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto.

Chris went to the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library to get her hands on a copy of The Way it Was by Harold Loeb and a first edition of Dracula. Learn more about the Poison Book Project: how it started and how it is going.

Emily went to the Madison Cinemas to see The Quiet Girl based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan.

Chris and Emily went on a two-day joint jaunt to New York City. Chris worked at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library. Emily volunteered at Cherry Bombe Jubilee. On the second day, Chris wandered from the Lower Eastside to Midtown and stopping at Codex Books, NYU Bookstore, and The Strand.

Emily binged Tiny Beautiful Things on Hulu based on the book by Cheryl Strayed.

– Upcoming Jaunts – [59:17]
On April 26th, Emily will be attending a virtual conversation with Maggie Smith and Elissa Altman about Maggie’s just released memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful; co-sponsored by Barrett Bookstore and Main Street Books.

Chris is planning to attend a series of four virtual events with author Benjamin Taylor that the National Willa Cather Center is offering beginning on April 27th. Taylor’s new book, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, publishes on November 14, 2023. Learn about Taylor’s virtual study series here.

Willa Cather’s birthplace is for sale: learn more here.

Emily is heading to the Newburyport Literary Festival April 28-30 where she will be moderating two author sessions:
Fur, Feathers, and Scales: A Lifetime of Caring for Pets with author Karen Fine and Shaped by Loss: How Tragedy Changed the Lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James with author Megan Marshall.

May 4-5th, Chris and Emily will be going on a joint jaunt to Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT for Booktopia 2023.

– Upcoming Reads – [01:04:39]
Real Life: The Journey from Isolation to Openness and Freedom – Sharon Salzberg (CW)(EF)

– Out Now – [01:05:59]
Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club – J. Ryan Straddal

– Our 25th Readalong –
The Reading List by Sara Nisha Adams. Order from Bookshop.org, the audiobook from Libro.fm to support the Book Cougars. Join the online conversation on Goodreads. Please send an email if you would like to participate in the Zoom readalong discussion will take place on May 21st at 7PM (ET), Chris and Emily will discuss it on Episode 183.

– Also Mentioned –
West with Giraffes – Lynda Rutledge
Books by Robert Richardson: William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, and Emerson: The Mind on Fire.
Margaret Fuller: A New American Life – Megan Marshall
The Islanders – Meg Mitchell Moore
Ann Petry
The Sunwise Turn Bookshop
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
The Poison Book Project
Grove Press
Brokeback Mountain – Annie Proulx
Brokeback Mountain movie
Kitchen Arts & Letters Bookstore
Jabberwocky Bookshop

You can help support the Book Cougars via our affiliates:
Libro.fm audiobook platform: Follow this link and use promo code: bookcougars
Shop on Bookshop.org – support the Book Cougars and independent bookstores!

If you’d like to help financially support the Book Cougars, please consider becoming a Patreon member. If you would prefer to donate directly, email for instructions.

Join our Goodreads Group!

Check out our BookTube Channel and be sure to subscribe!

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

Episode 179 - Deep Dive with Poet Shuly Cawood

Episode 179 Show Notes
CW = Chris Wolak and EF = Emily Fine

Emily read “Climbing” from Book of Light by Lucille Clifton.

You can find the video of Chris and Emily rearranging the readalong shelf at Book Cougars headquarters here.

– Currently Reading – [7:50]
Voyager – Diana Gabaldon (CW)
Chase of the Wild Goose – Mary Gordon (CW)
The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron (EF)
Writing for Impact: 8 Secrets from Science That Will Fire Up Your Readers’ Brains – Bill Birchard (CW)
Summer Stage – Meg Mitchell Moore (EF) release date 5/23/2023

– Episode Sponsor – [14:00]
Episode 179 is sponsored by The Peak Experiment. Learn more about Diana X. Moga here.

– Just Read – [14:59]
Writing Down the Bones – Natalie Goldberg (EF)(audio)
Why Am I So Anxious: Powerful Tools for Recognizing Anxiety and Restoring Your Peace – Tracey Marks (CW)(audio)
You can find her on YouTube.
My Dearest Darling: Letters of Love in Wartime – Lisa Franco (EF)
Bookselling in America and the World – edited by Charles B. Anderson (CW)
The Lager Queen of Minnesota – J. Ryan Stradal (EF)
Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret – Judy Blume (CW)(EF)(audio)
Watch the video with us talking about the book on YouTube.

– Biblio Adventures – [42:32]
Chris went to New York City to meet a fellow writer and visited the new McNally Jackson bookstore in Rockefeller Center where she picked up the Writing Down the Bones Deck of writing prompts. Before catching the train home she walked through the Polonsky Exhibition of The New York Public Library’s Treasures.

Chris and Emily went to Boston and worked at the Simmons University Library then took a browse at Brookline Booksmith. Chris bought A Small Book of Grave Humour by Fritz Spiegl and The Crystal Frontier by Carlos Fuentes.

– Upcoming Jaunts – [50:30]
Emily is heading to the Newburyport Literary Festival April 28-30 where she will be moderating two author sessions: Fur, Feathers, and Scales: A Lifetime of Caring for Pets with author Karen Fine and Shaped by Loss: How Tragedy Changed the Lives of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James with author Megan Marshall.

Chris is bummed that she won’t be able to attend either of the two Willa Cather conferences this June. She is planning to attend a series of four virtual events with author Benjamin Taylor that the National Willa Cather Center is offering beginning on April 27th. Taylor’s new book, Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather, publishes on November 14, 2023. Learn about the conferences and Taylor’s virtual study series here.

– Upcoming Reads – [58:50]
Travels with Charley in Search of America – John Steinbeck (CW)(EF)(audio)
Learn more about the Vintage Book Club.
Three Roads Back: How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives – Robert D. Richardson with a foreword by Megan Marshall (EF)
The Other Family Doctor: A Veterinarian Explores What Animals Can Teach Us about Love, Life, and Mortality – Karen Fine, DVM (EF)
Best American Short Stories 2023 – edited by Min Jin and Heidi Pitlor Lee (EF) release date 10/17/2023

– Out Now –
On the Trail of the Jackalope: How a Legend Captured the World's Imagination and Helped Us Cure Cancer – Michael P. Branch
Chain Gang All Stars – Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
You Could Make this Place Beautiful: A Memoir – Maggie Smith

– Poet Spotlight with Shuly Cawood – [1:00:55]
We speak with Shuly about her poem “Starter Marriage” from her forthcoming collection Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough available for PREORDER NOW.  
Learn more about Shuly’s publications and workshops here.

___________________________________________
Starter Marriage
after Erin Adair-Hodges*

First there was the word and the word was trying.
Trying the apartment with white walls, popcorn ceilings,
footsteps heavy above, thudding over our days.

Trying the job I took filing papers into squeaking cabinets,
the one you took answering phones for dentists. Trying
the brown bag lunches with limp sandwiches

and sliced cheese, the softening apple, the room-temperature
soda. Consuming it all on church steps, hunched below
the overhang as it rained. Trying the cold pool after work

with dead insects needing to be netted. Unraveling towels,
TJ Maxx suits, the walk back on the no-car driveway.
All heat evaporated. Empty stomachs. No one wanted what the other craved.

Trying the red Chevrolet with the bad battery, no parking without pay,
the bus rides to and from work, your stop, my stop, the sun hitting hard,
us squinting at the sky. Your last day, the blue electric toothbrush

they gave you as goodbye. Buzzing in your mouth with all those
trapped words. Trying the new queen mattress
we could not afford but bought anyway.

Trying the laundry we toted to the next
building, plastic hampers in our
arms full of every day’s dirt.

Coffee but no creamer,
bread but no toaster,
sugar hardened in the bag.

Day-old everything bagels,
buy-one, get-one veggie burritos,
dollar theater on Sundays.

New job but less pay, new boss
but no promotion. Saving for tickets
for never vacations.

Trying the places we gave up for each other:
city salted by an ocean, all those fish and ferry rides;
town with three stoplights, two policemen,

a forest to get lost in. Your dreams, my dreams,
weeds by the parking lot. Trying
your face a broken banister,
my hands an unused map.

*The first nine words are borrowed from “Portrait of Mother: 1985” by Erin Adair-Hodges
___________________________________________

– Also Mentioned –
Book Barn
John William Tebbel
Sylvia Beach
Shakespeare and Company
Parnassus on Wheels – Christopher Morley
The Sunwise Turn Bookshop
Also by J. Rion Straddal: Kitchens of the Great Midwest and Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club
Erin Adair Hodges

You can help support the Book Cougars via our affiliates:
Libro.fm audiobook platform: Follow this link and use promo code: bookcougars
Shop on Bookshop.org – support the Book Cougars and independent bookstores!

If you’d like to help financially support the Book Cougars, please consider becoming a Patreon member. If you would prefer to donate directly, email for instructions.

Join our Goodreads Group!

Check out our BookTube Channel and be sure to subscribe!

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

Episode 176 - We're in a New York State of Mind

Episode One Hundred Seventy Six Show Notes
KEY: CW = Chris Wolak and EF = Emily Fine

– Patreon Giveaway News –
Congratulations to Julie who won the February Patreon giveaway: The Wise Hours: A Journey into the Wild and Secret World of Owls by Miriam Darlington.
The upcoming Patreon giveaway is Bright and Deadly Things by Lexie Elliott. Check out Our Mystery Man, John Valeri, in conversation with Lexie on Episode 128 of Central Booking. To be automatically entered to win, become a Patreon by March 15th.  

– Currently Reading – [2:42]
Parnassus on Wheels – Christopher Morley (CW)(EF) (audio)
Dragonfly in Amber – Diana Gabaldon (CW)
Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir – Iliana Regan (EF)

– Just Read – [8:10]
The Sunwise Turn: A Human Comedy of Bookselling – Madge Jenison (CW)
Moonrise Over New Jessup – Jamila Minnicks (EF)
Sarah and the Big Wave: The True Story of the First Woman to Surf Mavericks – Bonnie Tsui, Illustrated by Sophie Diao (EF)
A Singer’s Romance – Willa Cather (CW) (Learn more about the short story project.)
I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death – Maggie O’Farrell (EF)(audio)
Where Snow Angels Go – Maggie O’Farrell, illustrated by Daniela Jaglenka Terrazzini (EF)
Ms. Demeanor – Elinor Lipman (EF)
Pineapple Street – Jenny Jackson (EF) release date 3/7/2023

– Biblio Adventures – [39:25]
Chris and Emily went to Playhouse on Park and saw the production of Indecent by Paula Vogel and stopped for a browse at Riverbend Bookshop in West Hartford.

Chris and Emily spent two days in New York City. Chris was doing research on Madge Jenison at the main branch of the New York Public Library. Emily got a chance to meet Elinor Lipman at an event via Book the Writer; Chris browsed in Book Culture while Emily was at the event. On day two they had brunch at Russ & Daughters Café with the author Matthew Goodman, visited the Virginia Woolf exhibit and the updated gift shop at the library, and shopped for office supplies at Kinokuniya Books.

Thanks to Anne in Austin, Emily had a virtual biblio adventure watching the first episode of Truth Be Told based on the novel, Are You Sleeping by Kathleen Barber.

Chris attended a lecture through the Bibliographical Society about the library of the Elliots of Minto presented by Meghan Constantinou.

– Upcoming Jaunts – [01:01:56]
Chris is planning to attend an event on Tuesday, February 28th at 4pm (ET) at the Beinecke Library titled Cow, Codex, Collagen: The Many Lives of Parchment with Bruce Holsinger, author of On Parchment: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture from Herodotus to the Digital Age.

April 28-30, 2023: Newburyport Literary Festival

May 5-6, 2023: Booktopia at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, VT

Emily is heading to California to visit Aunt Ellen.

– Upcoming Reads – [01:02:40]
The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox – Maggie O’Farrell (EF)
Speak for the Dead – Amy Tector – (EF) release date 3/14/2023
The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley: A Poet’s Journeys Through American Slavery and Independence – David Waldstreicher (CW)

– Out Now – [01:05:40]
Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age – Katherine May

– Also Mentioned –
Burn the Place – Iliana Regan
Zora Neale Hurston
Pen America Award
Why We Swim – Bonnie Tsui
“Nanette: An Aside” – Willa Cather
The Song of the Lark – Willa Cather
A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Stacy Schiff
Mameve Medwed
Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Serial Podcast
The Grolier Club

You can help support the Book Cougars via our affiliates:
Libro.fm audiobook platform: Follow this link and use promo code: bookcougars
Shop on Bookshop.org – support the Book Cougars and independent bookstores!

If you’d like to help financially support the Book Cougars, please consider becoming a Patreon member. If you would prefer to donate directly, email for instructions.

Join our Goodreads Group!

Check out our BookTube Channel and be sure to subscribe!

Subscribe to our monthly newsletter.