by Chloe Ackerman

The Chippewa Valley Book Festival began on Monday, October 15th and goes through Thursday, October 25th, spreading literary events across the Chippewa Valley. The festival’s lineup includes a variety of events like writing workshops, dinner discussions, events for children, and much more, so there is something for everyone!

I had the chance to sit down with Mildred Larson, a co-chair of the festival, who has been with the Chippewa Valley Book Festival since the very beginning. We talked about how it has grown over the years and what she is looking forward to in this year’s festival.

CHLOE ACKERMAN: How did the book festival start?

MILDRED LARSON: The book festival started out as a partnership between the L. E. Phillips Memorial Library and the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center 19 years ago. I was working at the public library, we had a grant from the American Library Association for a series of authors and discussions, and we needed a co-sponsor separate from the library. We found the Literary Arts Committee from the Eau Claire Regional Arts Center. Their representative was Karen Loeb, now a retired UWEC English department faculty member, so she and I did that grant. It just seemed to work well, and I think that’s how it got started. We were able to get a few more grants to bring more authors in so obviously it wasn’t the size of the current festival. At first, it was called The Festival of the Turning Leaves. I think people didn’t quite get the pun of turning pages in a book and fall, so that was kind of lost. We decided to change the name to something more obvious, and it became the Chippewa Valley Book Festival.

Many people have helped with the festival over the years, but the UWEC English department has been very helpful all along. Nadine St. Louis, who has passed away, was an English professor and poet and one of the first chairs of the book festival committees. After she passed away, we started to have a memorial poetry reading at the festival in Nadine’s honor at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation. The theme of this year’s reading is called Words Without Borders: A Celebration of Poetry in Transition. It’s at 4:00 p.m. on Friday, October 19th.

How has the Chippewa Valley Book Festival grown since it began in 2000?

It’s grown in a lot of different ways; we have expanded the number of days, and we’ve expanded to include more locations. This year, we have programs in five public libraries: the Eau Claire Public Library, and then also in Menominee, Chippewa Falls, Altoona, and Fall Creek. We’ve tried various locations around town, for example, we have had programs for several years at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation. We have programs on university campuses, and this year for the first time we have a program at UW-Stout.

We’ve also added different kinds of events, such as writing workshops and a theatre event. The biggest addition has been authors in the public schools. We have ten authors coming to public schools in Eau Claire, Menominee, and Mondovi so it varies each year. It’s a wonderful experience for the kids. We have writing workshops for children and a Young Writers Showcase. For the showcase, young writers submit writing to be selected by English honors students at UWEC. Those whose work is selected will read at the Grand Theater in Eau Claire on Sunday, October 21st in the afternoon. It's fun and lively, and the children are excited to read to an audience.

What are you most excited for in this year’s Chippewa Valley Book Festival?

I am most excited about moving some of our programs into the Pablo Center. Barstow & Grand, David Treuer’s Native Americans and the Imagination, and then the third one at the Pablo Center is Caroline Fraser, author of Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder. David Treuer’s talk will be in the JAMF Theatre, the Barstow & Grand release party will be in one of the rehearsal rooms, I believe, and then the final one, Caroline Fraser, will be in the big RCU Theatre which is a large auditorium. So we will be using three different spaces in the Pablo Center.

What kind of connections do the authors in this festival have to the Chippewa Valley?

We have local authors and we also have authors coming from Los Angeles, California, Spartanburg, South Carolina, and other faraway locations. This year we have three authors who are regional or local, there is Nickolas Butler who is going to be at UW-Stout, there’s Thomas Pearson who is going to be at the Fall Creek Library talking about frac sand mining, and then Molly Patterson who will be at the Menominee Public Library. Every year we have sort of a mix of local and regional writers and writers from around the country.

What do you hope those who attend The Chippewa Valley Book Festival events will take away from them?

I mostly hope they enjoy themselves. We look for authors who are going to be exciting presenters and we have scheduled a great range of types of literature and topics, so people should be able to find whatever’s of interest to them. For writers, we hope some of them will be inspired by the writers we bring, and then the people will maybe find some reading they want to follow-up with.

Is there anything else you would like to add?

Because it’s a long festival, it’s sometimes hard to get all the events out in front of people. I hope people will go to the website and look for more information on the authors and the programs. I hope that they will be coming all the way through October 25th when we have two very excellent programs; there’s Molly Patterson and there’s Heather Swan who is going to be at the Chippewa Falls Public Library. She has a book about honeybees, and it’s a very beautiful looking book. I am certainly hoping that people will continue right through the 25th of October.