Looking for Love in the Sears Catalog

THIS SUNDAY, April 7, 2024 from 1:30 to 4 p.m.

Join us at The Wild Eye Pub, 535 Mill St Grass Valley, CA 95945

A book launch and signing for: Looking for Love in the Sears Catalog

(by Beverly Leach, (Ruth Ghio’s given name) JOIN US!

“I was born in the Fred Finch Home for Unwed Mothers in Fargo, North Dakota,” is the opening salvo of Ruth Ghio’s memoir, Looking for Love in the Sears Catalog. The memoir recounts the early years of Ghio’s eventful life which began nearly 92 years ago.

Accompanying Ruth will be Julie Valin, poet, member of The Poetry Crashers, and book design guru; Donna Hanelin, poet, writer, and creative writing teacher; Julia Connor, poet, sculptor, painter, writer, and twice poet laureate of Sacramento; Susan Suntree, poet, performer, and essayist; Maxima Kahn, writer, poet, and creativity coach; Kit Bailey, percussionist, and Laura Pendell, poet and writer.

Here is the full text of the praise/blurb I wrote for this memorable book:

Ruth Ghio’s memoir about her terrifying childhood in a poor, alcoholic Finnish immigrant family in North Dakota participates in the American literary tradition wherein nature providescrucialsolace, affecting the outcome of a story. Even Upton Sinclair’s grim novel, The Jungle, about the degradation and despair of a Lithuanianimmigrant family working in the Chicago stockyards concludes with the main character, Jurgis, finding redemption in Socialism and in the green vistas of the natural world beyond the stockyard’s gray stench. Nature fortifies both body and soul, inspiring a fresh vision of what must be done to live an authentically better life. Similarly, in the worst circumstances of her childhood, the mysterious beauties of the natural world stirred in Ruth a sense that life spread wide and wondrous in the territory beyond her family. Each chapter begins with a short poem that in direct language and images evokes the resilient and curious spirit of the girl, the author herself, who is the protagonist of this memorable story.

Once there was a child sitting on the porch after a scorching day.

Eating the first summer watermelon, tasting the sweetness,

the juices running down her chin.

The sun descending between two prairie hills, like a golden loaf of bread.

And she asked herself, “Where did it go?”

In turns horrifying and inspirational, Ruth’s memoir is a vulnerable, penetrating, vivid meditation on the profound deprivations of body, mind, and spirit that drove her parents West in an attempt to grasp their American dream. And she bravely contemplates the life-long effort it has taken her to create her life out of those nearly devastating beginnings. From her secret childhood dreams shaped by reading the Sears Catalogue, to her family’s flight from North Dakota to the Golden Land-–her mother’s name for California, to a brief stay on the Oregon coast, to her teenage years in Oakland and Richmond tenements, Ruth’s story is quintessential; an American life told with wrenching tenderness.