Join us for a reading with Julia Henshaw, who will be reading from her new collection of essays, Real Good Stories: Then and Now. This event will be free and open to the public.
Real Good Stories is a collection of true stories of events, adventures, and interesting characters past and present. One begins on the Stony Point Road in 1891; another is set in a Michigan supermarket in 2016. Henshaw’s prankster father is vividly portrayed, as is a stern Viennese art history professor, a convicted Detroit murderer, and a severe Buddhist nun in Hong Kong. Misadventures happen in Korea, Russia, and India, where she confronts her waning interest in Buddhism. Making friends wherever she goes, Julia Henshaw confronts all her experiences with an open mind and records them in a clean, easy style.
Books have always been part of Julia Henshaw’s life. While attending St. Anne’s School in Charlottesville, she helped out at the New Dominion Bookshop; at Wellesley College, she majored in art history and worked in the library. After an entry-level editing job at Macmillan in New York, she then taught art history for several years, and eventually became the director of publications at the Detroit Institute of Arts. This position involved travel to Europe and Asia, encouraging her love of interesting places, first instilled when she lived with an Italian family in 1962. Julia now lives with her partner on a small farm in Northfield Township, Michigan, where she serves as a founding member of the local Land Preservation Committee, working to save farmland and forests.