In-Person: THE WATERS by Bonnie Jo Campbell

Please join us for an in-person event welcoming Bonnie Jo Campbell to celebrate the release of THE WATERS. For this event, Bonnie Jo Campbell will be joined in conversation by W&CF co-founder Linda Bubon.

Please note: Pre-registration for this event is required. By pre-registering, you are verifying that you are fully vaccinated and will wear a mask throughout the entirety of the event.

A master of rural noir returns with a fierce, mesmerizing novel about exceptional women and the soul of a small town.

On an island in the Great Massasauga Swamp—an area known as “The Waters” to the residents of nearby Whiteheart, Michigan—herbalist and eccentric Hermine “Herself” Zook has healed the local women of their ailments for generations. As stubborn as her tonics are powerful, Herself inspires reverence and fear in the people of Whiteheart, and even in her own three estranged daughters. The youngest—the beautiful, inscrutable, and lazy Rose Thorn—has left her own daughter, eleven-year-old Dorothy “Donkey” Zook, to grow up wild.

Donkey spends her days searching for truths in the lush landscape and in her math books, waiting for her wayward mother and longing for a father, unaware that family secrets, passionate love, and violent men will flood through the swamp and upend her idyllic childhood. Rage simmers below the surface of this divided community, and those on both sides of the divide have closed their doors against the enemy. The only bridge across the waters is Rose Thorn.

With a “ruthless and precise eye for the details of the physical world” (Jane Smiley, New York Times Book Review), Bonnie Jo Campbell presents an elegant antidote to the dark side of masculinity, celebrating the resilience of nature and the brutality and sweetness of rural life.

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Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the novels Once Upon a River, a National Bestseller which was adapted into a full-length feature film released to international claim in 2020, and Q Road. Her critically acclaimed short fiction collections include American Salvage, which was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction; and Mothers, Tell Your Daughters. She was a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow whose other honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Eudora Welty Prize, and the Mark Twain Award. She lives outside Kalamazoo with her husband and two donkeys. http://www.bonniejocampbell.net

Linda Bubon is co-founder and former co-owner of Women & Children First Bookstore. She and her business partner, Ann Christophersen, opened the bookstore in 1979 as a way to contribute to the international feminist movement and to join with and support those in Chicago working to further the rights and well-being of women & children. Women & Children First has been honored with awards from Chicago Now, the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin Foundation, Bailiwick Reporatory Theatre, and The Lesbian Community Cancer Project, among others. In 2004, the Chicago Sun-Times named Ann and Linda among the city’s 100 most powerful women. She retired in 2020.

Accessibility: This event is hosted at the bookstore, which is a wheelchair accessible space. Masks are required. Seating is on a first-come, first-serve basis. To request ASL interpretation or captioning for this event, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com by no later than 14 days before the event. For other questions or access needs, please email events@womenandchildrenfirst.com.