LOCAL AUTHORS DISCUSS: Writing Nonfiction

LOCAL AUTHORS DISCUSS is a (mostly!) monthly program featuring members of the Door County Published Authors Collective. Each month features new themes and new authors. This month: Local Authors Discuss Writing Nonfiction.

 Angela Bier, Thomas Davis, Judy DuCharme, Annette Langlois Grunseth, Judy Ann Ritter, and Charles Schudson, members of the Door County Published Authors Collective, will read from their work and discuss writing various forms of nonfiction, including memoir, history, personal essay, and more.

This program is free and open to the public. Book clubs are especially welcome, as are readers and writers of all ages.

Angela Bier is the author of The Accidental Archivist: Finding Kathleen’s biological father should have been easy. He was a priest somewhere in Angie’s family tree. The problem? There were seven potential priests. Angie Bier is drawn into the search including dusty archives, clues hidden in plain sight, and the cutting edge of commercial genetic testing.

Thomas Davis‘s book Sustaining the Forest, the People, and the Spirit, tells the story of the United Nations recognizing the Menominee as one of only seven examples of a sustainability culture found throughout the world. This book not only describes how that sustainability and the forest came to be, but it also examines how lessons from the Menominee example can be applied to the rest of American society.

Judy DuCharme is the author of The Cheesehead Devotional, Hall of Fame Edition. Walk with Packer greats down the road of adventure, honor, and faith. Judy connects each player, each glorious victory, and each devastating loss to eternal truths and principles for purposeful living. Sometimes humorous, sometimes serious, Judy shows us that walking with God is as fun as watching football.

Annette Langlois Grunseth is retired from a career in healthcare marketing and public relations. She received the 2022 Hal Prize for poetry and a 2022 Gold Medal from the Military Writers Society of America for her book, Combat and Campus: Writing Through War, a biography of her brother’s Vietnam War letters and her concurrent year at UW-Madison during the antiwar protests. She earned a Pushcart prize nomination with her book Becoming Trans-Parent: One Family’s Journey of Gender Transition.  Grunseth has been published in Wisconsin People & Ideas, Bramble, The Poeming Pigeon, and contributed to Door County anthologies, Soundings: Door County in Poetry and Halfway to the North Pole. She has received awards from the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, The Wisconsin Academy, and The Mill, A Place for Writers. She is a member of the Belles Lettres writing group, Door County Poets Collective, Door County Published Authors Collective, and Write On Door County. In her free time, she enjoys bicycling, writing poems from her kayak, and camping in Door County.

Judy Ann Ritter is the author of A Year Aboard Sankaty. Following retirement, she and her husband gave up their conventional lifestyle, sold their house, and spent a year living aboard a newly purchased 36-foot sailboat. They completed America’s Great River Loop, spending the winter in Florida and taking a side trip to the Dry Tortugas, finding a little piece of heaven there.

Charles Schudson is the author of Independence Corrupted: How America’s Judges Make Their Decisions. Discover how trial judges and appellate judges decide their cases — trial judges alone and appellate judges collaboratively — from a former judge who discusses the good, the bad, and the ugly of the processes.