We will share a pre-recorded conversation with T. Marie Bertineau (The Mason House, September 29) to discuss her debut memoir about cycles of grief and loss within a family and how reconnecting to the family's roots helped them begin to heal. Linda Gallant, the Project Director of The Head & The Hand, will engage the author on questions ranging from what the experience of simultaneously writing about and learning about one’s Indigenous heritage is like to where folks eager to learn more about the history of Indigenous culture in the U.S. can find valuable resources for deeper engagement.
Register here.
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
After her father's untimely death, Theresa faced a rocky and unstable childhood. But there was one place she felt safe: her grandmother's house in Mason, a depressed former copper mining town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula.
Gram's passing leaves Theresa once again at the mercy of the lasting, sometimes destructive grief of her Ojibwe mother and white stepfather. As the family travels back and forth across the country in search of a better life, one thing becomes clear: if they want to find peace, they will need to return to their roots.
The Mason House is at once an elegy for lost loved ones and a tale of growing up amid hardship and hope, exploring how time and the support of a community can at last begin to heal even the deepest wounds.
AUTHOR BIO
Born amidst the copper mining ruins of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, T. Marie Bertineau is of Anishinaabe-Ojibwe and French Canadian/Cornish descent. She is a member of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community on the L'Anse Reservation, migizi odoodeman. Her work has appeared online with Minnesota’s Carver County Arts Consortium; in Mino Miikana, a publication of the Native Justice Coalition and Waub Ajijaak Press; in the annual journal U.P. Reader; and is anthologized with the Chanhassen Writers Group of Minnesota. Married and the mother of two, she makes her home in the Great Lakes Region.
ABOUT LANTERNFISH PRESS:
Lanternfish Press, founded in Philadelphia in 2013, publishes literature of the rare and strange: fiction that crosses the boundary between literary and speculative; real or imagined tales of characters at the margins of history; essays rooted in a strong sense of place; a cabinet of curious Victorian reprints. We seek the grotesque, the alien made familiar, the “I don’t know what this is—but I love it.”
ABOUT THE HEAD & THE HAND:
We're a nonprofit independent publisher and bookstore located in Philadelphia. Our goal is to create innovative relationships between authors and the work they produce. We look for writing that shows a connection from the head to the hand and publish stories that have the power to change and entertain.