Spencer Lewis, recording artist, stonemason, and author presents Cabin Songs: Searching Woody Guthrie's America and Finding Home in Vermont, his newly published memoir. An evening of selected passages along with live guitar accompaniment with a discussion and book signing to follow.

These newly minted "Storysongs" come alive with Lewis’ unique and compelling approach, adding drama and passion to stories of homesteading in 1970’s Vermont amidst the infamous drug culture, traveling the open road, logging with a draft horse, and finally building relationships with the old Vermonters he befriended to achieve the ultimate goal of finding himself and his art.

Anyen Rinpoche returns to the Northshire to speak about the practice of Phowa. Phowa is the the teaching on how to prepare for our own deaths and to help others of any faith through the dying process. It is a traditional Tibetan Buddhist practice, performed by all lineages, that supports the dying person to release attachments, remember the spiritual teachings they have been given, and offer favorable conditions for liberation or a positive rebirth. It can benefit all beings, Buddhist or non-Buddhist, as well as animals.

Anyen Rinpoche was born in Amdo, Tibet. He is the heart son of Kyabje Tsara Dharmakirti Rinpoche and holder of the Longchen Nyingthig lineage. Anyen Rinpoche founded the Orgyen Khamdroling Sangha and the Phowa Foundation in Colorado. The author of The Union of Dzogchen and Bodhichitta, Momentary Buddhahood and Dying with Confidence, he also hosts the annual Medicine Buddha Monlam in Denver, Colorado.

He is the author of Dying With Confidence, Momentary Buddhahood: Mindfulness And The Vajrayana Path, Union Of Dzogchen And Bodhichitta : A Guide To The Attainment Of Wisdom, and the forthcoming Journey to Certainty (June 2012).

An amazing and joyous community get-together where your attendance and support can make a real difference.

Please join us on Saturday, March 3 at the Spiral Press Cafe for the 3rd Annual Rock & Bowl to benefit the Community Food Cupboard. Local musicians - including SoFar, students from BBA, Long Trail, and Maple Street - of all ages will perform coffee-house style from 7-9pm.

"Think Globally, Educate Locally" : Please join Long Trail School on Sunday, March 4, 3-5pm for a presentation & panel discussion about Long Trail's International Baccalaureate (IB) Programme and other global initiatives.

The Northshire is proud to present local author Megan Mayhew Bergman as she presents her powerful and heartwarming debut collection of short stories Birds of a Lesser Paradise.

From veterinary clinics to prison farms, roadside zoos and the swamps of the south, Birds of a Lesser Paradise beckons readers into a world where nature continues to shape the course of our lives, despite our efforts to control and manage the environment. A talented and perceptive new writer, Bergman’s stories are full of heart without being sentimental, and deftly draw on the personal experience of a Southerner transplanted to the Northeast to weave a collection of stories about the intersection between humans, animals, and the earth.

Megan Mayhew Bergman, talking about her forthcoming book and her life. Birds of a Lesser Paradise.

Megan Mayhew Bergman grew up in Rocky Mount, NC and attended Wake Forest University. She has graduate degrees from Duke University and Bennington College. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals including Ploughshares, Oxford American, One Story, and Narrative. “Housewifely Arts” was included in The Best American Short Stories 2011 (edited by Geraldine Brooks). She lives in Shaftsbury, VT with her veterinarian husband, two daughters, four dogs, four cats, one horse, and several goats and chickens.

The Northshire Women Read group will meet on Monday, March 12th, 6pm at The Inn at Manchester.
Our book choice for March is, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, by Kate Atkinson.

New members are always welcome. If you would like more information on this reading group, please contact nscheemaker@northshire.com .

The Northshire Bookstore Dark Side Reading Group will meet in our conference room on Wednesday, March 14th, at 1pm, for a discussion of Dead End Gene Pool: A Memoir, by Wendy Burden.

The Northshire Cookbook Reading Group will meet on Wednesday, March 14th, at 6pm, at the Inn at Manchester. If you love to collect cookbooks, explore new recipes, and nosh on home prepared food in a group - this could be the reading experience for you!

This month, we're cooking comfort food from the delicious pages of, Northern Comfort: Fall & Winter Recipes from Adirondack Life, by Adirondack Life Magazine and Annette Nielsen. Pick up your copy in the bookstore, choose a recipe to prepare and share with the group on the night of the meeting. Please email Nancy, nscheemaker@northshire.com, to register and let her know what's cookin!

If you would like more information about this fun, dynamic, afternoon reading group, please email Sarah Knight at sknight@northshire.com.

“The fabulous Margot Livesey has written a book steeped in remote landscapes, secret histories, and great love. Orphan Gemma is a modern-day Jane Eyre, thoroughly engaging and bracingly unsentimental. The prose is meticulous, the tale transporting. Trust me, you will love this book.” —Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club and Wit’s End

The Flight of Gemma Hardy, is an inventive reimagining of the Jane Eyre story. Set in mid-twentieth century Scotland, Livesey’s atmospheric homage to Brontë’s literary masterpiece traces the misfortunes and misadventures of a strong-willed orphan girl who finally comes into her own.

Margot Livesey is the acclaimed author of the novels The House on Fortune Street,Homework,Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, and Banishing Verona. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a writer in residence at Emerson College.

From bestselling, nationally celebrated author Howard Frank Mosher, The Great Northern Express. Mosher's escapades with an astonishing array of erudite bibliophiles, homeless hitchhikers, country crooners and strippers, and aspiring writers of all circumstances.

Full of high and low comedy and rollicking adventures, this is part travel memoir, part autobiography, and pure, anarchic fun. From coast to coast and border to border, this unforgettable adventure of a top-notch American writer demonstrates that, sometimes, in order to know who we truly are, we must turn the wheel towards home.

James Richardson, the author of several collections of poetry, criticism, and aphorisms, awarded or nominated for some of the top awards in American literature, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award will appear at the Riley Center at Burr and Burton to read from his latest collection By the Numbers on March 22nd at 7 pm.

James Richardson is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Princeton and has recent poems and aphorisms in Slate, The New Yorker, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Harold Bloom's American Religious Poems, David Lehman's Great American Prose Poems: Poe to the Present, Geary's Guide to the World's Great Aphorists, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and several volumes of The Best American Poetry.

Also featured will be performances from our local finalists for the Poetry Out Loud National Competition:Shaneal Wynter, Jamie Abrams, Rachel Foster.

This event is free and open to the public. The Northshire Bookstore will be selling copies of Richardson’s books at the event and he will be happy to personalize any copies following the event. Can’t make it? If you’d like a signed book from any of our author events, please call us at 800-437-3700 to pre-pay and we’ll have one or more copies signed and reserved for you or shipped almost anywhere!

From the daughter of William Styron:part biography, part memoir, part elegy - Reading My Father

Few novelists of the past 50 years have enjoyed the huge success and lengthy renown of William Styron. With Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Confessions of Nat Turner, Styron established himself as a masterful chronicler of the American experience. But his gift for fiction came at a heavy price. The last twenty-five years of Styron’s life were marked by episodes of devastating depression, the first of which he documented with stunning candor in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. Reading My Father is a portrait of this towering, mesmerizing, occasionally crippled man by his youngest daughter, Alexandra Styron, wrought with intimacy, incisiveness, integrity, and love.

In this three hour workshop, students will design, construct, and take home a birch bark basket created from natural materials supplied by the instructor.

Bliss will guide students through the process of creating a paper pattern, choosing bark, and cutting out a shape to be folded into a bowl. Each student will then learn how to make a simple awl to keep for birch bark bowl making. Bliss will then guide the class through creating the bowl's rim from a willow wand, and then sewing bowl and rim together. This workshop will also include discussion and exhibits of traditional forms of birch bark containers, as well as harvesting techniques.

Class space is limited!!!!!

Please purchase your ticket on line, by calling the store, or visiting one of our customer service desks.

Email Nancy at nscheemaker@northshire.com with questions or assistance in reserving your space in class.

Brittany Perham, former Manchester resident, presents her debut collection of poems The Curiosities. "With curatorial precision and a starling's penchant for multiple threads in both song and shelter, Brittany Perham has fashioned a haven if curiosities to the ear as well as the eye."

Brittany Perham is the Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009-2011, and she also teaches in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco. She is the recipient of the Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia, the Magliocco Prize for Poetry given by the Bellevue Literary Review, and an Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity Prize in Ethics. Her work, twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, may be found in Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Linebreak, Lo-Ball, and elsewhere.

NEW LOCATION AND TIME! Tickets on sale now!

The Northshire welcomes Rachel Maddow, host of the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as she presents her highly anticipated book Drift at Manchester Elementary Middle School (directions here).

"Here's this conservative's assessment of Rachel Maddow's Drift: It's scathingly funny, deeply insightful, and informed throughout by a deep and abiding sense of patriotism. Bravo, Rachel!" -- ANDREW J. BACEVICH, author of Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

"In Drift, people who love Rachel Maddow will discover that her gift for finding amazing anecdotes and funny, revealing details totally translates to the page. People who hate her may be surprised by how often in Drift she espouses some of the most conservative values: a suspicion of big government and unbridled federal power, a zeal to cut wasteful spending and a yearning to return to the intentions of the Founding Fathers." --IRA GLASS, host of public radio's "This American Life"

$28.00 ticket entitles holder to one copy of specially priced copy of DRIFT and one general admission seat.

$8.00 ticket entitles holder to one general admission seat.

Can’t make it to the event? Pre-order DRIFT now and we will have it signed and shipped to you. Click here for information on getting signed copies.

Rachel Maddow discusses her prescriptions for the military and her new book, Drift, with Slate.com. Listen here.

Rachel Maddow has hosted the Emmy Award-winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC since 2008. Before that, she was at Air America Radio for the duration of that underappreciated enterprise. She has a doctorate in politics from Oxford and a bachelor's degree in public policy from Stanford. She lives in rural western Massachusetts and New York City with her partner, artist Susan Mikula, and an enormous dog.