Pushing the River
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.
Tales of ambition, adventure, rivalry, friendship, and love on the waters of the Mississippi River and beyond. In this thrilling collection, award-winning writer Frank Bures tells true stories as varied as the waters, weather, and rhythms of a canoe trip. From the terror of two kayakers who barely escaped from the 2011 Pagami Creek Fire in the Boundary Waters to two young campers who had a supernatural scare in Canada’s Quetico Provincial Park in the 1970s to the author’s own incredible rescue, Bures narrates the full range of what it means to push the river.
The heart of the book is a telling of the lost history of the Paul Bunyan Canoe Derby, an annual 450-mile race run on the Upper Mississippi in the 1940s and 1950s that gave canoe-racing legend Gene Jensen his start—and which changed the course of modern canoeing. The tale includes the dominance of racers from the Leech Lake Indian Reservation, including many members of the Tibbetts family, and the unacknowledged contributions of Ojibwe canoe builders Jim and Bernie Smith, whose design features are now part of contemporary canoe racing.
Pushing the River is essential reading for anyone who loves what legendary canoeist Bob O’Hara called “the sense of perpetual adventure” that comes in the seat of a canoe, where you never quite know what you will encounter around the river’s next bend.
In conversation with Maggie Ginsberg.
Frank Bures
Former Madison writer Frank Bures is the author of The Geography of Madness: Penis Thieves, Voodoo Death and the Search for the Meaning of the World’s Strangest Syndromes. His stories for Madison Magazine won six Milwaukee Press Club awards. Elsewhere his work has been included in the Best American Travel Writing, selected as “Notable” in the Best American Essays and Best American Sports Writing. It has also appeared in Harper’s, Aeon, Lapham’s Quarterly, The Washington Post Magazine, and other places.
Maggie Ginsberg
Maggie Ginsberg is a writer, editor and author in Wisconsin. Her debut novel, Still True, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in September 2022 and won the Wisconsin Library Association’s 2023 WLA Literary Award for Fiction. It was the honorable mention selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award, one of four finalists for the Chicago Writers Association 2023 Book of the Year, a 2023 Midwest Book Awards silver medal winner in the Literary/Contemporary/Historical Fiction category, and one of three finalists for the Women’s Fiction Writers Association STAR Award for Outstanding Debut.
Maggie is also a nonfiction writer and editor who published hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles throughout her career, earning numerous honors from the City Regional Magazine Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors and the Milwaukee Press Club. She is the former managing editor at Madison Magazine and now works full-time as a writer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.