Subject: Local History List Serve "Finding Josie" Press Release Date: Fri, 30 May 2008 15:48:24 -0500 Message-ID: <B46BC0C8F6373F43B0A84089442FE921014D97F2@MEWMAD1P0129.enterprise.wistate.us> From: "Seymour, Janet I - WHS" <Janet.Seymour@wisconsinhistory.org>
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Kathy Borkowski
May 30, 2008
(608) 264-6465
WISCONSIN HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS ANNOUNCES PUBLICATION OF
"FINDING JOSIE," A MEMOIR BY WENDY BILEN
The Wisconsin Historical Society Press announces the release of "Finding
Josie" (ISBN: 978-0-87020-391-6; hardcover $26.95), a memoir by Wendy
Bilen. Weaving the story of a 1940s Midwestern farm wife - her
grandmother, Josie Brodhead - with her own life's journey, Bilen creates
a moving account of how our lives intersect with our ancestors' lives
and what we gain from the search to know them better. "In looking for
Josie," she writes, "I've stumbled onto myself."
Thirty-five, childless, and newly married, Wendy Bilen is struggling to
find meaning in an urban life that has, so far, centered on her career.
She has recently made a dramatic change, though - leaving her corporate
job in Chicago and entering a writing program. There she discovers a
path that leads backward in time, through family hardship and triumph,
to a young woman full of contradictions, much like herself - ambitious
yet thwarted, committed yet restless, creative but dutiful.
Bilen's quest begins in Carson, N.D. - Josie's birthplace - and winds
through the coulees and river valleys of the upper Midwest, taking her
further and further into the details of her grandmother's past, as well
as her own. Bilen tracks down relatives and friends, wanders through
cemeteries and farm fields, and sits down at the kitchen table of the
family farmhouse in La Crosse, Wis., to listen to remarkable stories
about Josie. Along the way, Bilen shakes out the folded quilt of her own
life, holding the rips and tears up to the light.
Without sentimentality, resisting any impulse to romanticize her rural
roots, she plumbs her grandmother's history in search of meaning and
wisdom in her own life. Does she find it? Readers will be surprised, not
only by what Bilen discovers about Josie, but by what she shares of her
own soul.
"Some things happen in spite of ourselves," she writes, "because of the
work she did long ago, and the work I'm doing now, it's come to where it
should be. ... she extends the left hand, I the right, and together we
will tell this story."
Media: For review copies of the book, or author or book photos, please
contact
Kathy Borkowski, Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 816 State St.,
Madison, Wis. 53706; phone (608) 264-6465; fax: (608) 264-6486; e-mail:
whspress@wisconsinhistory.org.
To arrange an interview with the author, please contact Bilen directly
at (202) 529-1952 or via e-mail at at (202) 529-1952 or via e-mail at wendybilen@gmail.com.
The Wisconsin Historical Society owns and operates the Wisconsin
Historical Society Press, the state's oldest publisher.
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