Coffee and Conversation: Martha Egan

Join us for coffee, light refreshments, and a conversation with author Martha Egan, who will read from and discuss her forthcoming novel The Little Devils of Door County.

Martha Egan grew up in a large family in De Pere and Egg Harbor, Wisconsin. Her four novels have won regional and national prizes. Egan’s most recent novel, An Apricot Year, earned a total of nine awards. Unlike her previous fiction, which is set in New Mexico, her current novel, The Little Devils of Door County, is based on her summers in the iconic Door peninsula in northeast Wisconsin.

For sixty years, Egan has been involved with Latin American folk art, through study in the United States, Mexico, and Germany; her service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Venezuela; and, since 1974, as an importer and retailer through her store, Pachamama. She has written several books and articles about folk art and has given presentations throughout the US, Spain, and Portugal.

About The Little Devils of Door County

Two childhood friends now in their 70s, Kitty and Art, are reconnected by Sven, a mutual friend from their summer days in the 1950s in Birch Bluff, a fictional town in Wisconsin’s fabled Door County. Sven is a small press publisher in Minnesota with a nose for a good story. Knowing that neither Kitty nor Art can now travel or resume their careers full-time, and both are good wordsmiths, he urges them to write about the freewheeling summers of their childhood. Kitty and Art agree to alternatively describe those days and the zeitgeist of the era, when the polio epidemic terrified everyone.