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Elk River Arts & Lectures and Elk River Books present a reading featuring Betsy Gaines Quammen in celebration of her newest book, This Haunted Land: Reckoning with Ghosts and the Stories that Shape America. This free event will take place Thursday, October 29, at 7 pm at Elk River Books, 122 S. 2nd St., Livingston. Doors open at 6:30 pm with remarks at 7 pm. This Haunted Land investigates some of America’s most enduring legends and uncovers how ghost stories can illuminate some of the most unsettling parts of history. With curiosity, a touch of skepticism, and an open-hearted willingness to learn from the living and the dead, Gaines Quammen takes readers on a journey into haunted towns, forgotten lives, and abandoned places. From a once-booming uranium mining community in Colorado to a fort on the coast of Florida that predates the United States itself, this riveting exploration of memory, mourning, folklore, and social anxiety shows that politicized efforts to rewrite history can only be defeated by bearing witness to the specters of the past.
“This Haunted Land proves that our landscapes—from abandoned mines to stolen plains—hold the echoes of our greatest transgressions. No one can tell a ghost story, or a story about the soul of America, better than Gaines Quammen,” says CMarie Fuhrman, author of Salmon Weather and director of the Elk River Writers Workshop.
Gaines Quammen is a historian and award-winning writer who received a PhD from Montana State University, where she studied religion, history, and the philosophy of science. Her dissertation focused on Mormon history and the roots of armed public land conflicts in the United States. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, and the History News Network. She is the author of American Zion and True West; This Haunted Land is her third book. She lives in Bozeman, Montana, with her husband, writer David Quammen, three big dogs, a sturdy cat, and a lanky rescue python.
For those who can’t attend in person, the event will be live-streamed on the Elk River Books YouTube channel. For more information, email [email protected] or call (406) 333-2330.
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Elk River Books, 124 S 2nd St, Livingston, MT 59047-2604, United States
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