Six Female Authors Share Their Stories at The Ultimate Book Club Chapter 2

Vanessa Skildum, Staff Writer

In honor of Women’s History Month, the Janesville women’s fund hosted the Ultimate Book Club Chapter 2, featuring six female authors to talk about their writing journey and promote their books. The event took place on Thursday, March 14 at the Janesville Performing Arts Center. Doors opened at 5:30 p.m. with the event starting at 6 p.m. 

The authors all had different pathways to get to writing their books. Sue Berg, author of the Driftless Mystery Series, recounted how she isn’t quite sure how she ended up writing. She always loved reading mystery books, saying “I read every single Nancy Drew mystery that ever existed and I kept reading mysteries and I still read mysteries.” While earning her master’s at the University of Wisconsin La Crosse, she went into the archives of the library and came across a story about a missing gold shipment. She got inspired by this story, and she stumbled upon the book “Shut Up and Write” by Judy Bridges, and she quite literally took her advice. 

Amy Goldstein, author of “Janesville: An American Story,” says, “I was a writer decades before I became an author. I have always been a nonfiction writer. Unlike some of my colleagues, I am not very good at making stuff up… Janesville quite literally made me an author.” Goldstein spent 36 years at the Washington Post before just recently becoming a Fellow at Brookings Institution, a Washington D.C. think tank. She ended up in Janesville because she was looking to see what happened to people when good jobs went away. Janesville mirrored the pattern of job loss nationally during the great recession, a main reason due to the General Motors plant closing. As she said, “What is bad for life can be good for journalism.”

Pat Hall, author of eight independently published children’s books, wrote stories and poems as a kid. In 1978, she moved to Janesville to join a volunteer puppet group at the library where she would make puppets, throw shows, and come up with stories. As a parent, she read numerous children’s books and she thought that her stories were just as good. “I thought, why not try to reach a wider audience? I started sending out my manuscripts to publishers and I got many many many many rejections.” Her daughter started drawing for an independent publishing company in Minnesota and Hall was impressed with the quality of it, so she decided to give self-publishing a try. Here she is, eight books later, five of which have been published by her daughter. 

Hall remarked how her stories usually start with a “what if” question. Dr. Sagashus Levingston, author of “Infamous Mothers,” had a pathway also consisting of questions. She took a survey of American literature and noted all of the major writers of history. There was only one black writer, Frederick Douglas, which led her to wonder who else was writing. In the search for answers, she came across a quote by Adrienne Rich which said, “We know more about the air we breathe, the seas we travel, than about the nature and meaning of motherhood.” This hit close to her, as at the time, she was a single mother of three. She then started looking into stories of mothers. Those who had bad decks dealt with them and made it out. It was all those questions and her hustle that led her up to the point of writing her book, “I didn’t have a set path.” Levingston said, “I was just following bread crumb after bread crumb after bread crumb.” 

Sandra Ramírez, author of “Sin Gritos ni Castigos [Without Shouts or Punishment],” is a Beloit College Alumni. She is originally from Ecuador and came to Beloit for college. She then moved back with her husband to Ecuador before deciding to come back to Wisconsin to go back to school. She also had her first child during all of this. Neither she nor her husband’s family was close, so they were learning how to parent by themselves. As a school psychologist and educator, she learned a lot about neuroscience. She wanted to do something with that knowledge as “Discipline is such a hard thing to talk about and practice. There are a lot of different philosophies and there is no correct way. We all go through parenting and don’t necessarily know how to do it.” She took her experience as a mother, along with her neuroscience knowledge, and wrote a book in Spanish to share, as there is not a lot of literature about parenting in Spanish. 

Jennifer Carmody, author of “The New Days,” published her debut novel in 2022. She took an entrepreneurship route as she co-owns a company with her brother, Kane Carmody, called Post Shields. She spent the last six years working on her company and creating the world for her novel in her spare time. No two authors on the panel had the same writing journey. However, they all ended at the same place, with a published book. 

Alongside the authors, there were two performances. The Circle Arts Collective, a newly formed women-led and women-focused performing art organization in southern Wisconsin, performed a presentation called “Women of Wisdom: Voices of Classic Literary Heroines” with President Ashley Hirsh and students from the Parker Arts Academy. The presentation consisted of quotes from Jo March from the book “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott, Jane Eyre from “Jane Eyre,”  by Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Bennet from “Pride and Prejudice,” by Jane Austin. The quotes were the character’s thoughts on things like independence, bravery, authenticity and self-worth. 

An original song written by Teresa Nguyen titled “Breaking Glass” concluded the main portion of the event. Performed by Nguyen and Ashley Hirsh, the song spoke about breaking the glass ceiling women face. The glass ceiling is a metaphor within sociology that talks about an invisible barrier and bias that keeps minorities and women from advancing within the workplace. The chorus goes, “Keep breaking glass. Don’t ever give up. Don’t quit the job, no. Just get it done. Keep reaching upward. Don’t you ever look down. Until that ceiling is on the ground. Keep breaking glass.” 

When asked about it afterward, she remarked what she hoped women would get out of the song, “I hope they feel inspired. That woman can do anything, even break the glass we’ve been stuck under. It’s not easy, but it is not impossible either.”