A Spirited Threesome: Good Friends with New Books Come to Mystery to Me

         Years ago, I took a fiction writing class during a summer session at Boston University. The instructor asked for absolute honesty in critiquing the stories of the other students. We did this so well that a month into the class, you couldn’t find two students who would speak to each other.
         That memory surfaced recently when I read the promotional material about three authors who will appear together at Mystery to Me on Sunday, Oct. 9 at 2 p.m.
         Mary Lamphere, Kristin Oakley and Kathleen Tresemer met through the Rockford Writers Guild, and later formed a professional writers’ organization called In Print. The three women also belong to the same critique group, The Chicks of the Trade.
         I was looking forward to Oct. 9, and asking the authors about friendship, ego and the writing life. Alas, I am going to be somewhere in the middle of Lake Michigan, on the Muskegon to Milwaukee ferry, returning from a wedding, when the event takes place.
         So I did the next best thing. I invited Lamphere, Oakley and Tresemer to the store for a chat on an afternoon in September, in order to provide newsletter readers a preview of the Oct. 9 event.
         I can assure you it will be lively.
         Not only have these women remained friends in the face of judging one another’s work, their mutual support system helped each publish a new novel in the past few months.
         It’s the way writers’ groups are supposed to work.
         Mary Lamphere’s novel, Pocket Money, was the first published, in June. She grew up in Rockford and lives in DeKalb. Lamphere – her author byline is M F Lamphere – is an artist and did her own cover art for the novel, which concerns four high school friends who reunite for a day after college – a day of revelations, and proof the past is never past.
         Kathleen Tresemer’s Time in a Bottle is a young adult novel that has garnered quite a few adult readers since being published in August.
         “I’m a ‘save the world’ person,” Tresemer told me, which means her tale of a high school girl who has it all – including an alcohol addiction – has a hopeful ending. Tresemer grew up in the Chicago area, has worked as a child welfare specialist, and now lives in Rockton, north of Rockford.
         Kristin Oakley’s novel, God on Mayhem Street, just out in September, is a sequel to her 2014 novel, Carpe Diem, Illinois. Leo Townsend, the Chicago newspaper reporter protagonist of the first book, returns in the new volume, having landed a prize interview with an openly gay, front-running presidential candidate. But when Townsend’s estranged father suffers a near-fatal heart attack, scuttling the interview – well, things are just getting started. Oakley is a UW-Madison graduate who has lived in Madison for the past several years; prior to that, she lived in Freeport and Rockford.
         The Rockford Writers Guild, where the three women met, dates to 1947.
         “It was a great place to start,” Lamphere said, but after a time, in Tresemer’s words, “we wanted something a little more professional.”
         In September 2010, the women got together in Oakley’s kitchen, tossed around some ideas, and decided they’d launch a group dedicated to the craft of writing, with regular workshops, speakers and networking opportunities.
         “The hardest thing was to come up with the name,” Lamphere said.
         The collective goal was to get published, so they decided on In Print.
         A year or so later, Tresemer joined the small critique group to which the other two already belonged. It’s called The Chicks of the Trade and today consists of the three of them and a fourth writer, Catherine Conroy.
         As mentioned, this was where the friendships had a chance to go sideways, but they have not.
         “In the beginning,” Oakley said, “one of the women [who has since left the group] got a little defensive.”
         A rule was instituted: The writer whose work is being critiqued has to remain quiet until the session is finished. Criticism is delivered with respect and in a constructive manner. It’s still not easy.
         “It’s soul crushing,” Tresemer said, then smiled. “For a minute.”
         They agree it helps their writing, and that’s what it’s all about.
         They’ll talk about that, and their new books, on October 9 at 2pm. It will be a fun afternoon. They’re all still writing. Lamphere compared being published for the first time to what a friend told her about getting her first tattoo.
         “I can’t wait to do it again!"

October -- It's a Festival of Book Events!

Jerry Apps

Kathleen Ernst

Patricia Skalka

Angela Palm

Arcade-Era Cocktails Reimagined! With Andre Darlington...

The event takes place at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

Three Seatings are available for this event:  

5:30 - 6:15
6:30 - 7:15 
7:30 - 8:15 

For information and to RSVP, please go to the Wisconsin Book Festival website linked here. 

Under the Harrow is Flynn Berry’s debut novel: a chilling story with a slow-burning feeling of dread, a sophisticated psychological edge, and a sharpness that Gillian Flynn fans will love. It grabs you immediately and doesn’t let go.







Friday, October 21st - 7:30 pm
Wisconsin Science Festival presents Tetris by Box Brown
Wisconsin Institute for Discovery (De Luca Forum) 

It is, perhaps, the perfect video game. Simple yet addictive, Tetris delivers an irresistible, unending puzzle that has players hooked. Play it long enough and you’ll see those brightly colored geometric shapes everywhere. You’ll see them in your dreams.  Alexey Pajitnov had big ideas about games. In 1984, he created Tetris in his spare time while developing software for the Soviet government. Once Tetris emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, it was an instant hit. Nintendo, Atari, Sega—game developers big and small all wanted Tetris.

Friday, October 21 - 7:30 pm
Cara Black comes to the Wisconsin Book Festival! 
Central Library, Room 302

The world knows Aimée Leduc, heroine of 15 mysteries in this New York Times bestselling series, as a très chic, no-nonsense private investigator—the toughest and most relentless in Paris. Now, author Cara Black dips back in time to reveal how Aimée first became a detective.

November 1989: Aimée Leduc is in her first year of college at Paris’s preeminent medical school. She lives in a 17th-century apartment that overlooks the Seine with her father, who runs the family detective agency.

Saturday, October 22
It's a big day at the Wisconsin Science Festival! Stop by to say hi to folks from Mystery to Me! We'll be there selling these fabulous books. 

All Book Events for the Science Festival are in the DeLuca Forum at the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery and are hosted in cooperation with the Wisconsin Book Festival.

12 noon 

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil

Weapons of Math Destruction traces the arc of a person’s life, from school to retirement, and looks at models that score teachers and students, sort résumés, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole and prison sentences, and monitor our health. The models being used are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong.

1 pm

The 100 Year Miracle by Ashley Ream

If you were given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to save yourself, would you take it? Even if it cost you everything? This question is the driving force behind Ashley Ream’s whip-smart, powerful and captivating The 100 Year Miracle.
 

  3 pm

The Sacred Disease by Kristin Seaborg

Young Kristin Seaborg had the world at her fingertips: a loving family, happiness and security, early admission to medical school--until the frightening diagnosis of epilepsy threatened to destroy both her career path and her health. Living in constant fear that her seizures would intensify and prevent her from practicing medicine, Kristin kept her condition a closely guarded secret, leading a tenuous double life as patient and practitioner. A memoir of discovery, acceptance, and hope, The Sacred Disease chronicles Kristin’s tenacious fight for a seizure-free life

5 pm 

Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein 

Children of the New World introduces readers to the lost characters of a near-future of social media software implants, manufactured memories, dangerously immersive virtual reality, and frighteningly intuitive androids. Some live in a superficially utopian future of instant connection and mutual understanding that belies an unbridgeable distance; others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild. All are attempting to hold on to their humanity.
6 pm

Mapping the Heavens by Priyamvada Natarajan

This book provides a tour of the “greatest hits” of cosmological discoveries—the ideas that reshaped our universe over the past century. The cosmos, once understood as a stagnant place, filled with the ordinary, is now a universe that is expanding at an accelerating pace, propelled by dark energy and structured by dark matter. Priyamvada Natarajan, our guide to these ideas, is someone at the forefront of the research—an astrophysicist who literally creates maps of invisible matter in the universe.

Book Festival Continues with Charlaine Harris! 

Sunday, October 23 - 1:30 pm
Charlaine Harris comes to the Wisconsin Book Festival!
Central Library - Community Rooms 301 & 302

After a thirteen year hiatus, Harris triumphantly returns to the series which began her successful career. All The Little Liars picks up where we left off, with Aurora Teagarden just married to her true love, crime writer Robin Crusoe, and the couple is basking in the news of her pregnancy.

Sunday, October 23 - 2 pm
Wisconsin Science Festival presents One in a Billion: The Story of Nic Volker and the Dawn of Genomic Medicine. This is the breathtaking story of a young boy with a never-before-seen disease, and the doctors who take a bold step into the future of medicine to save him—based on the authors’ Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting.




 

Working Stiff