The Midwest Bagel Quest book — coming soon
Turns out every time the far right takes over all three branches of government —Wisconsin in 2011 and the full federal government in 2025 — my job is defunded and I decide to write a book.
In 2012, I started researching the book I would eventually publish in 2018, We Are Staying: Eighty Years in the Life of a Family, a Store, and a Neighborhood. The neighborhood in question was the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where my family had owned Radio Clinic, a small appliance shop, since 1934. When I described my project and plan to my husband Matt, I told him I would probably need to spend a lot of time at my brother’s house in Brooklyn to do my research at the public libraries and historical centers. He suggested I check out the Wisconsin Historical Society, they would probably have all the information I needed. I wasn’t sure why a repository of Wisconsin history would have what I was looking for, but between their digital archives of New York newspapers going back 100 years, the NYC travel books in the basement stacks from the early 1900s, and so on, they definitely did. I had never been inside the building and was happy to spend my time digging through the digital archives in this beautiful space.
It took me six years to write my We Are Staying book, and for a couple of those years, I worked part-time at the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Last summer, Kate Thompson, the Acquisitions Editor for the WHSP, emailed me to see if I wanted to meet up for a drink and encouraged me to submit a book proposal about my Midwest bagel quest. So I did. And as of today, I am the proud owner of a bagel quest book deal.
Thanks for following along on the bagel quest. I will probably put together some questionnaires and surveys to help me with my research, so stay tuned.
When I first embarked on this quest, I commissioned my banjo-playing niece to compose a bagel-traveling ditty. This is the theme music for the quest, and it's a nice little earworm.
Christopher Ming, a videographer who grew up on the same block as Radio Clinic, made me this lovely book trailer after reading the book.
Congrats!
Congratulations!!