Booklovers’ Cafe

(Airdate: May 7, 2024) Booklovers’ Cafe host Cris Wilson is joined by Fisher Poet, author, and salmon troller Tele Aadsen to talk about her memoir, What Water Holds, a sea-to-plate story told with love. This is a book full of stories of a life spent fishing the waters around Sitka, and a lyric celebration of the marine environment. Tele is a handtroller on the boat Nerka that she shares with her partner Joel. The collection of stories will appeal not only to people on the water but naturalists, environmentalists and all who think deeply about our world and our place as stewards of the wild. This book was chosen by the Anchorage Daily news as one of the top books of 2023.

(Airdate: April 9, 2024) Host Cris Wilson has the pleasure of talking with Tim McNulty about Salmon, Cedar, Rock, and Rain: Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. This book is a rich and vivid study of both Olympic Park and its surrounding peninsula, featuring stunning full-color photos alongside natural and human histories. The essays explore why the Olympics and its natural, cultural, and economic communities are worth understanding and why sustaining a resilient future benefits us all! This book includes contributions from indigenous leaders as well as an introduction by David Guterson. More info here.

(Airdate: June 4, 2024) Jon Karpilow visited Cris Wilson at the new Fort Worden studio for Booklovers’ Cafe to talk about his new book, A Liberal’s Search for America: Tales from the Gunshop. Jon has landed in PT after a spell in Calaveras County where he worked in a gun shop called The Rusty Knife. The characters that hang out here are indeed memorable and a picture of Americans we rarely spend much time with here in the PT bubble. Alternatively funny and frightening, there are indeed some good tales. Jon is currently writing features for the Leader and volunteering where he is needed.

(Airdate: February 27, 2024) Cris welcomes Port Townsend author Adrianne Harun to Booklover’s Cafe to talk about her newest novel On the Way to the End of the World. This work of literary fiction has been chosen as the 2024 Port Townsend Community Read. The story is set in a milltown on the peninsula in the Spring of 1963. A small group has accepted President Kennedy’s challenge to walk 50 miles in 20 hours. The characters are unique and mostly strangers to one another but as they walk and face unknown threats, they form a community with various gifts to bestow like wish knots along a length of line. The trails and spots are familiar yet not quite as they make their way to the bluff at the End of the World.

(Airdate: January 30, 2024) Rikki Ducornet joins Cris Wilson on Booklovers’ Cafe to talk about her latest novella The Plotinus and to celebrate the reprint of Phosphor in Dreamland. Rikki is a transdisciplinary artist, fiction writer, and essayist who resides in Port Townsend. She has written 10 novels including Trafix, Netsuke, and The Jade Cabinet. Her work follows her dreams into the realms of surrealism and science fiction. She brings themes of authoritarian abuse, tyranny, beauty, and hope into her writing with a mastery of language and sensuality.

(Reprise Airdate: January 16, 2024) Once again this tremendous book is Number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list boosted by the movie directed and produced by George Clooney. Cris talked to Daniel James Brown back when the book was new and causing a sensation first in the rowing world and then when everyone recognized the power of an irresistible story about beating the odds and finding hope in desperate times. Here we are again cheering Joe Rantz from Sequim.

(Airdate: January 2, 2023) Cris Wilson discusses The Ways of Water, a first novel with long time Port Townsend resident, Teresa Janssen. The story builds on family lore and deep research telling the life of a young girl in the early 20th Century, living in the hard scrabble desert of the American Southwest. The story flows with twists and turns, devastating yet hopeful and determined. It is full of rich sensory images and emotional and descriptive language. Too often in history the lives of the humble and especially the women are left untold.  Teresa has remedied this oversight with a terrific book for everyone!

(Airdate: December 5, 2023) Joining Cris Wilson to talk about her writing career and her latest book is Rachel Fordham. Rachel’s latest novel is titled The Letter Tree. It is set in Buffalo, New York in 1924, a place Rachel knows well, and it shows. She writes with an open mind discovering where her characters will lead her, always asking What if? In the novel Laura Bradshaw is the heir to the Bradshaw Shoe Company and since her mother died she has been isolated by an overprotective father. He is consumed by his business and his feud with his competitor, the Campbell Shoe Company. Laura is forbidden to associate with anyone from the Campbell clan and she eases her isolation by exchanging letters with a mysterious friend. Part romance, part mystery, this is a book to relax your mind in troubled times.

(Airdate: October 10, 2023) Booklovers’ is pleased to talk to author Jane Haigh about her latest Green New Deal novel, Waiting for the Storm. This book uniquely imagines an area in New Hampshire 40 years from now that has made the infrastructure changes necessary to survive a climate-change-driven hurricane. What is particularly fascinating about this story is the way a small group of ordinary people get together to work in local politics and businesses and make positive changes in transportation, housing, and energy – a lesson that our area is also working towards. None of these solutions is science fiction.

(Airdate: November 7, 2023) Cris Wilson welcomes author, storyteller and old time musician Mitch Luckett to Booklovers’ Cafe. Mitch‘s latest novel titled Holy Roller Heart is set in the Missouri Ozarks. The Portland Tribune says anyone with a taste for bazaar fiction will have plenty to feast on in these pages. I certainly agree. This story is set in the 1950s where a 13-year-old Moses Grady Witt is trying to straddle a barbwire fence between Pentecostal zealotry and Ozarkian witchery. The strain at times almost rips our hero apart. Mitch himself spent the first 12 years of his life on a hardscrabble farm in hills of Missouri. He eventually settled on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, and has been a hod carrier, preschool teacher, landscaper, school bus, driver, and the Portland Audubon Nature sanctuary’s Director. He has also written two books set on the Olympic peninsula titled To kill a Common Loon and The Man in the Loon!