Carmichael's Bookstore and The Berry Center are excited to host an event with Nick Offerman, star of the hit television series Parks and Recreation and the FX series Fargo, for a reading and signing of his new book Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop. Each $40 ticket includes a copy of Good Clean Fun ($35) and a $5 donation to The Berry Center, a nonprofit organization with the mission of putting Wendell Berry's writings to work by advocating for farmers, land conservation, and healthy regional economies.

PURCHASE TICKETS HERE

Nick Offerman is the author of two bestselling collections of humorous essays, Paddle Your Own Canoe and Gumption. He is also the proprietor of The Offerman Woodshop, which you might be surprised to learn operates amid the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles. There, Offerman and his crew of woodworkers design and create not only fine handcrafted furniture, but also fun stuff like kazoos, baseball bats, and ukuleles. In his new book, Nick and his ragtag crew will share their experiences of working at the Woodshop, tell you about their passion for woodworking, and even teach you how to make a handful of their most popular projects. Even if you're not into woodworking, you'll enjoy this ode to craftsmanship heavily laced with Nick's unique brand of humor and tomfoolery.

Carmichael's presents The Shepherd's View: A Conversation with James Rebanks & Wendell Berry

Wednesday, November 9th at 7 PM

Louisville Free Public Library Auditorium • 301 York Street

Free and open to all. Reservations requested.

RSVP HERE

James Rebanks, the author of the surprise bestseller, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape, returns this fall with The Shepherd's View: Modern Photographs from an Ancient Landscape, in which he chronicles the daily life of his shepherding community in England's Lake District with 80 breath-taking color photographs alongside his wise and captivating prose.  

Carmichael's is thrilled to host an event with Mr. Rebanks and our own beloved author, poet and shepherd, Wendell Berry.

We are excited to host Kentucky poets Bianca Spriggs and Jeremy Paden in a joint reading and signing. Additionally, we are happy once again have Lynnell Edwards host an interview portion during this event.

Lynnell Major Edwards is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, The Farmer's Daughter (2003), The Highwayman's Wife (2007), and Covet (2011) all from Red Hen Press. Most recently her chapbook Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop was released by Accents Publishing (2014).

Bianca Spriggs is a multidisciplinary artist, Affrilachian Poet, and Cave Canem Fellow who lives and works in Lexington, Kentucky. Named as one of the Top 30 Performance Poets in the country by The Root, Bianca is the recipient of a 2013 Al Smith Individual Artist Fellowship in Poetry, multiple Artist Enrichment and Arts Meets Activism grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and a Pushcart Prize Nominee.

Jeremy Paden was born in Italy and raised in Central America and the Caribbean. He received his Ph.D. In Latin American literature from Emory University. His poems have appeared in such places as the Atlanta Review, Beloit Poetry Review, Cortland Review, Louisville Review, Naugatuck Review, pluck!, and Rattle, among other journals and anthologies.

For Erik Reece, life, at last, was good: he was newly married, gainfully employed, living in a creekside cabin in his beloved Kentucky woods. It sounded, as he describes it, "like a country song with a happy ending." And yet he was still haunted by a sense that the world--or, more specifically, his country--could be better. He couldn't ignore his conviction that, in fact, the good ol' USA was in the midst of great social, environmental, and political crises--that for the first time in our history, we were being swept into a future that had no future. Where did we--here, in the land of Jeffersonian optimism and better tomorrows--go wrong?

Rather than despair, Reece turned to those who had dared to imagine radically different futures for America. What followed was a giant road trip and research adventure through the sites of America's utopian communities, both historical and contemporary, known and unknown, successful and catastrophic. What he uncovered was not just a series of lost histories and broken visionaries but also a continuing and vital but hidden idealistic tradition in American intellectual history. Utopia Drive is an important and definitive reconstruction of that tradition. It is also, perhaps, a new framework to help us find a genuinely sustainable way forward.

Erik Reece is an assistant professor of English at the University of Kentucky and the author of several books including Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness: Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia.