The Spirits with Bonnie Jo Campbell and Dawn Burns

We’re excited to welcome Bonnie Jo Campbell back to our Grand Rapids event studio to celebrate The Spirits! This contemporary Christmas Carol set in small-town Michigan is perfect for fans who love stories that can best be described as “gritty, spooky, and ultimately heartening”.

We love seeing who is planning to join us! Your RSVP helps us prepare to host you.

About the Book:

The best-selling author of The Waters (a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick) returns with a tale of love, transgression, and the miraculous healing power of the holiday table.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, a master of rural American fiction, brings us a hair-raising winter tale to warm us by the fireside. In this contemporary Christmas Carol, Campbell has created a gritty, spooky, and ultimately heartening holiday story that unfolds in an isolated farmhouse. It is the night before Christmas in a small town in Michigan, and a young woman is haunted by her father’s death. She has been silently penitent for nine years, but her guilt and grief have estranged her from her community and her family. She has taken refuge in the natural world of the plants and trees she tends, but on this anniversary of the tragedy, the supernatural landscape is rattling its chains.

When a surprise guest appears at the (dreaded) Christmas Eve dinner, the family begins to open up and reveal dangerous secrets and crimes nobody is willing to face. Within this darkest chaos, a sliver of light appears, showing a way to reclaim communion and even a sense of humor. While redemption is never easy or wholesale, the story that a family creates together can heal wounds.

Not able to join us? Order your copy here: https://schulerbooks.com/book/9781324130901

About the Author:

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of The Waters, a Today Show “Read with Jenna” Book Club selection. Her other novels include Once Upon A River, a National Bestseller that was adapted into the award-winning film, and Q Road. Campbell’s short story collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and Women and Other Animals, an AWP Grace Paley Prize winner. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Eudora Welty Prize and Mark Twain Award. She lives outside Kalamazoo on a small farm with her husband and donkeys. Visit www.bonniejocampbell.net

About the Conversation Partner:

Dawn Burns is the author of A Green Glow on the Horizon and Evangelina Everyday, and founder and co-organizer of the SwampFire community of writers and artists. While thoroughly Midwestern, Dawn also loves to travel and is relentlessly curious about people and places. Dawn’s creative nonfiction has appeared in Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest, and in On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes.

A recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council, and an assistant professor at Michigan State University, Dawn is committed to writing and community building as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond their classroom.