April 12, 2018 | Posted by Village

Dear Gentle Reader,
Big weekend coming up at McIntyre’s. A triple header on Saturday followed by the ticketed Cecile Richards event, Make Trouble, in the Barn on Sunday. She will discuss her memoir Make Trouble with UNC’s Michele Tracy Berger. Tickets to attend the event are still available. Call the bookstore 919.542.3030.

Saturday’s 11am event with Bren McClain is something to put on your calendar – people raved about her when she was here last Fall, and Pete swears this is a perfect gift for Mother’s Day, which is just around the corner.

Last week we announced our Ready Readers program where we were asking for help to support rising third graders and send them home with a book this summer. $25 helps support a classroom. If you are interested in helping us reach this goal – please call us at the store 919.542.3030.

We announced also David Sedaris would join us in the Barn on Friday, June 1st. Tickets to attend are $29.89 and include entry to the barn (we will have more spots than seats for this event, so seats are not guaranteed) and a copy of Calypso, Mr. Sedaris’s first collection of essays in 5 years. Don’t wait to buy tickets as we have already sold half of them.

Friday, April 13th at 10:30am
Friday Storytime
Today’s theme: Fairies and Unicorns

Saturday, April 14th at 11am
Bren McClain enthralls with One Good Mama Bone

SPOILER ALERT: Bren McClain is the first author that Pete invited back BEFORE her event ended, which was seconded by the lucky few in the audience. DO NOT MISS OUT! A novel of courageous parental love and the instructive, healing bonds that form between humans and animals.

Set in early 1950s rural South Carolina, One Good Mama Bone chronicles Sarah Creamer’s quest to find her “mama bone” after she is left to care for a boy who is not her own but instead is the product of an affair between her husband and her best friend and neighbor, a woman she calls “Sister.” When her husband drinks himself to death, Sarah, a dirt-poor homemaker with no family to rely on and the note on the farm long past due, must find a way for her and young Emerson Bridge to survive. But the more daunting obstacle is Sarah’s fear that her mother’s words, seared in her memory since she first heard them at the age of six, were a prophesy: “You ain’t got you one good mama bone in you, girl.”

When Sarah reads in the local newspaper that a boy won $680 with his Grand Champion steer at the recent 1951 Fat Cattle Show & Sale, she sees this as their financial salvation and finds a way to get Emerson Bridge a steer from a local farmer to compete in the 1952 show. But the young calf is unsettled at Sarah’s farm, crying out in distress and growing louder as the night wears on. Some four miles away, the steer’s mother hears his cries and breaks out of a barbed-wire fence to go in search of him. The next morning Sarah finds the young steer quiet, content, and nursing on a large cow. Inspired by the mother cow’s act of love, Sarah names her Mama Red. And so Sarah’s education in motherhood begins with Mama Red as her teacher.

But Luther Dobbins, the man who sold Sarah the steer, has his sights set on winning too, and, like Sarah, he is desperate, but not for money. Dobbins is desperate for glory, wanting to regain his lost grand-champion dynasty, and he will stop at nothing to win. Emboldened by her lessons from Mama Red and her budding mama bone, Sarah is fully committed to victory until she learns the winning steer’s ultimate fate. Will she stop at nothing, even if it means betraying her teacher?

Bren McClain was born and raised in Anderson, South Carolina, on a beef cattle and grain farm. She has a degree in English from Furman University; is an experienced media relations, radio, and television news professional; and currently works as a communications confidence coach. She is a two-time winner of the South Carolina Fiction Project and the recipient of the 2005 Fiction Fellowship by the South Carolina Arts Commission. McClain won the 2016 William Faulkner–William Wisdom Novel-in-Progress for “Took” and was a finalist in the 2012 Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Award for Novel-in-Progress for One Good Mama Bone. This is McClain’s first novel.

Sunday, April 14th at 2pm
Michael Chitwood performs Search and Rescue

“In addition to his fine ear, Chitwood has a sure touch with aphoristic wisdom…” – Poetry

“Chitwood seems to be a Buddhist who hails from Appalachia, or he’s a motorcycle-riding philosopher taking dictation from nature, writing its gospel with his trusty crowquill pen.” – Amy Gerstler

In Search and Rescue, Michael Chitwood seeks what the pagan Celts called the thin places, the spots where otherworldliness bleeds into the everyday. Beginning with childhood, the poet meditates on the intersection of the sacred and secular, on those luminous moments we can only partially understand. Water anchors the collection with the title poem, which explores the history of a large manmade lake and how it changes the surrounding mountain community. Displaying keen narrative skills and an engaging voice, the poems in Search and Rescue pay homage to Whitman and Dickinson, to Heaney and Wright, in pursuit of the everyday grace of Appalachian culture and the natural landscape.

Born in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, Michael Chitwood lives and works as a writer and teacher in Chapel Hill, NC.

Saturday, April 14th at 4pm
Peter Curtis shares from Cafe Budapest

After a perilous journey from Prague, the penniless and exhausted Kohut family—Willy, Sophie and Pavel—reach Paris. They are desperate to find a way to join relatives in London but with Germany threatening to invade Holland and Belgium, routes across the Channel are blocked. France starts to mobilize her army and strengthen defenses. The Allies declare war on Germany.

Hoping to earn some money and find an escape route, Willy signs up with the reconstituted Czechoslovak army based in the south of France, under French military command. Sophie, still with Pavel in Paris finds part-time work at Café Budapest, run by an old Hungarian baker and his wife. A few weeks later, Pavel and Sophie flee south only to be swept up in the panic when France surrenders. In an emergency evacuation, the Kohut family along with thousands of Czechoslovak soldiers and refugees are evacuated by the British Navy to Gibraltar. Britain faces the Axis powers alone. The future is uncertain.

Born in Kosiče in Eastern Slovakia, Peter Curtis grew up in England and was enthralled by books like Treasure Island, King Solomon’s Mines and The 39 Steps. He dreamed of writing tales of adventure. After a career in medicine, he turned his talents to the written word. A former resident of Fearrington Village, he now resides in Seattle.

Sunday, April 15th at 2pm
Cecile Richards discusses her memoir Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead–My Life Story with Michele Tracy Berger

This is a $30 ticketed event in the Fearrington Barn, and includes a signed copy of Make Trouble. Buy your McIntyre’s Bookpass for the event here.

In her only planned North Carolina tour stop for her memoir, Make Trouble: Standing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding the Courage to Lead–My Life Story, Cecile Richards will discuss her life in activism with Michele Tracy Berger, Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC, on Sunday, April 15th at 2pm at the Barn in Fearrington Village. The discussion is a ticketed event, and tickets can be purchased by calling McIntyre’s Books (919) 542-3030 or online at the McIntyre’s Books storefront.

From Cecile Richards—president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and the Planned Parenthood Action Fund for more than a decade, daughter of the late Governor Ann Richards, featured speaker at the Women’s March on Washington, and a “heroine of the resistance” (Vogue)—comes a story about learning to lead and make change, based on a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and social justice.

Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. Richards had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. In the Richards household, the “dinner table was never for eating—it was for sorting precinct lists.”

From the time Richards was a girl, she had a front-row seat to observe the rise of women in American politics. She watched her mother, Ann, transform from a housewife to an electrifying force in the Democratic party who made a name for herself as the straight-talking, truth-telling governor of Texas. But Richards also witnessed the pitfalls of public life that are unique to women. Her experiences paint a powerful portrait of the misogyny, sexism, fake news, and even the threat of violence confronting those who challenge authority.

As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning minimum wage, and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all at the same time.

She shines a light on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages readers to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way. Richards has dedicated her life to taking on injustice, and her memoir will inspire readers to hope and action.

Tuesday, April 17th at 10:30am
Storytime with Miss Sarah
Today’s Theme: Get in the Garden

Thursday, April 19th at 4pm
Bookends Book Club meets at McIntyre’s to discuss Kingsley Amis’s classic novel of academia, Lucky Jim. Books selected by Bookends are available for purchase at McIntyre’s at a 20% discount.

Friday, April 20 at 10:30am
Friday Storytime
Today’s Theme: Bzzzz

Saturday, April 21st at 2pm
Cathy Cleary serves up The Southern Harvest Cookbook: Recipes Celebrating Four Seasons

Sunday, April 22nd at 2pm
Caroline Taylor shares from Enough!: Thirty Stories of Fielding Life’s Little Curve Balls

All the best from the usual suspects:

Pete, Sarah, Mouse, Billy, Johanna, Anna, Hazel, Kelley and Keebe