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Unravelling Shakespeare
Last night I had the opportunity to attend a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, produced by the Strollers Theatre company which performs in the Bartell Theatre here in Madison, Wisconsin (thank you, Project Famous, for the complementary...
Heroes to Me: Ferguson Public Library
I got a kick out of the advertisements this week for the TNT show The Librarians, featuring young librarians as super heroes. While not as dramatic and absent the explosions, real life librarians are often truly the super heroes of our society. Case in...
An Interview with Ben Perreth of Making Lemonade with Ben Fame
Ben Perreth is an incredibly amazing young man. At age seven he survived a brain hemmorage, as chronicled by his mother Katherine Perreth in the must-read book, Making Lemonade with Ben: The Audacity to Cope. That singular event launched him and his family...
A Conversation with Katherine Perreth, Author of Making Lemonade with Ben
Earlier this spring I had the opportunity to meet an incredible woman, Katherine Perreth, and her even more incredible son Ben, at a writers conference. I can’t begin to describe what happened to Ben in just a few paragraphs, except to say that at age seven he had a...
Yoopers Get Recognition, eh…!
Whoohoo! We made it into the dictionary—the Miriam Webster Dictionary to be specific. Who are we? We are Da Yoopers! Natives and expats of the U.P., Michigan’s glorious Upper Peninsula. It turns out the Urban Dictionary has recognized us since 2005. “Yooper is...
A Hero in My Eyes: Shannon Watts, Founder of Moms Demand Action
I remember where I was when I first saw the “Breaking News” on my iPhone: there had been a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. I was sitting in an elementary school classroom with a cadre of teachers—we were there to learn new...
Henry S. Miller’s 2014 Happiness Calendar
The 2014 Happiness Calendar below came to my email in-box as a free blog post to promote the book The Serious Pursuit of Happiness by Henry S. Miller, a motivational speaker and consultant. I did not write it. But I like the concept of a monthly focus...
Mystery Writer Christine DeSmet Doesn’t Fudge When it Come to Research
Set in a combination live bait and fudge shop in Wisconsin’s vacation wonderland, Door County, filled with quirky, likeable, and energetic characters, and…oh, did I mention?...mouth-watering! That’s the new novel by Madison, Wisconsin author Christine DeSmet who...
The Glass Ocean by Lori Baker: a Review
Czech glass makers Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka were so taken by the ephemeral, translucent nature of marine invertebrates that they use the art of sculpted glass to capture the essence of these complex sea creatures. American author Lori Baker was so taken by the...