Blue Bicycle Books

Tues., Oct. 3, at 6:30 pm, the Charleston Music Hall, Lowcountry Local First, Grow Food Carolina, Lowcountry Street Grocery & Blue Bicycle Books are excited to present a film screening of Look & See: A Portrait of Wendell Berry. Marcus Amaker, the City of Charleston’s first Poet Laureate, will open the evening with a spoken word performance. Tickets are only $5.

Get tickets here.

Wendell Berry, writer, poet, teacher, farmer, and outspoken citizen of an endangered world, gives us a compelling vision of the good and true life. Passionate, eloquent, and painfully articulate, in more than fifty works – novels, short stories, poems and essays — he celebrates a life lived in close communion with neighbors and the earth while addressing many of our most urgent cultural problems.

With Look & See, Berry tells the stories of several residents of Henry County, Kentucky who each face difficult choices that will dramatically reshape their relationship with the land and their community. Rather than train the lens on Berry himself, as would be an expected and more typical approach, Look & See allows Berry, in a sense, to point the camera toward the stories and landscapes he would have us regard: the stories of small generational farmers in Henry County as a way to better understand the struggles, hopes and vital importance of rural land-based communities.

• Brad Thomas Parsons
• David Wondrich
• Hanna Raskin
• Jon Bonne
• Kara Newman
• Megan Krigbaum
• Matt Lee
• Paul Clarke
• Robert Simonson
• Talia Baiocchi
• Wayne Curtis

Join us Fri., Aug. 18, 12 pm for lunch at High Cotton (199 East Bay St.), as Kate Fagan discusses her new book What Made Maddy Run (Little, Brown, 320 pp., $27). Kate will be in conversation with well-known health writer and yoga teacher Kathryn Budig. Tickets are $31 for the three-course luncheon and talk, or $58 including a signed copy of the book.

Tickets on sale here.

From noted on-air commentator and sports journalist Kate Fagan comes the heartbreaking and vital story of college athlete Maddy Holleran, whose suicide rocked the University of Pennsylvania campus and whose life reveals the struggle of young people suffering from mental illness today.

What Made Maddy Run began as a piece that Kate wrote for espnW. What started as a profile of a successful young athlete whose life ended in suicide became so much larger as Kate heard from other college athletes also grappling with mental illness. This is the story of Maddy Holleran and her struggle with depression, which also reveals the mounting pressure young people, and college athletes in particular, face to be perfect, especially in an age of relentless connectivity and social media saturation.

Kate Fagan is a columnist and feature writer for espnW, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. She is a regular panelist on Around the Horn and can also be seen on Outside the Lines, First Take and His & Hers. She is the author of a memoir, The Reappearing Act, and co-host of the espnW podcast, Free Cookies.  A former varsity basketball player at the University of Colorado, she gave the 2017 commencement address at her alma mater. Kate lives in Brooklyn with her girlfriend Kathryn Budig, and their two dogs.

Kathryn Budig is an internationally celebrated yoga teacher and author known for her accessibility, humor, and ability to empower her students through her message, “aim true.” She is a warrior for self-acceptance, honesty, and helping her students and readers find true balance. The Kansas native graduated from the University of Virginia with a double degree in English and Drama before moving to Los Angeles, where she trained under the tutelage of Maty Ezraty and Chuck Miller. She now lives in Brooklyn, with Kate.

Join us Thurs., July 27, 5 pm as Melissa Conroy will talk about and sign copies of The Lowcountry Coloring Book (Algonquin, pb., 96 pp., $12).

Melissa Conroy immerses readers in the graceful, haunting beauty of the South, from the stately mansions and intricate gardens of Charleston and Savannah to spots farther off the beaten path, such as the forest where the ruins of Old Sheldon Church stand, ancient and crumbling among the greenery; and the seashore, where shrimp boats find anchorage and the vanishing islands are home to sharks, alligators, monkeys, and egrets, but also to houses on stilts, half torn away by the tides and time. She also introduces local history and folklore, whether it’s in the Haint Blue Houses, painted a bright shade to keep away bad spirits, or the Waving Girl of Savannah statue, a tribute to the child who waved to all of the ships that sailed from the harbor.

As an added bonus, Melissa has created a technique wherein the drawings can be placed in a four-square pattern to create one larger piece of art. So, four 8-inch-by-8-inch drawings can be removed from the book and framed together to form a larger artwork measuring 16 inches by 16 inches.

Melissa Conroy grew up in the South Carolina Lowcountry, and every summer she returns with sketchbook in hand. She has MAs from the University of Georgia and Philadelphia University, in painting and textile design, and a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. Currently she lives in Philadelphia with her husband, daughter, and son. She is a part-time faculty member in the Textile Design Department at Philadelphia University.

Join us Thurs., June 29, 6 pm as local lawyer Armand Derfner will talk about his pivotal role in the American Civil Rights Movement. Beginning with his work representing disenfranchised voters in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1968, Armand was among the first lawyers to argue cases involving the Voting Rights Act. An essay based on these experiences has been included in a new book called Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers: Reflections from the Deep South 1964-1980 (University of Florida Press, hb., 440 pp., $45).

Voices of Civil Rights Lawyers offers eyewitness accounts of some of the most dramatic moments in civil rights history–the 1965 Selma March, the first civil judgment against the Ku Klux Klan, the creation of ballot access for African Americans in Alabama, and the 1968 Democratic Convention. The narratives depict attorney-client relationships extraordinary in their mutual trust and commitment to risk-taking. White and black, male and female, northern and southern, these recruits in the battle for freedom helped shape a critical chapter of American history.

Armand shaped the Voting Rights Act through his Supreme Court arguments in several of the earliest cases, including Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969) and Perkins v. Matthews (1971). He has testified before the Judiciary Committees of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives about extensions of the Voting Rights Act, as well as other pro bono legislation. With his late wife, Mary Frances Derfner, he assisted in passage of the Civil Rights Attorneys’ Fees Awards Act of 1976, as well as the Equal Access to Justice Act of 1980. For more than 20 years, he has represented litigants in two long-running suits to desegregate and end racial inequality in the higher education systems of Alabama (Knight v. Alabama) and Mississippi (Ayers v. Fordice). He is now a founding partner at Derfner and Altman, here in Charleston.