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Madison BookBeat

Madison BookBeat

Written by: Stu Levitan Andrew Thomas Sara Batkie David Ahrens Lisa Malawski
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Madison BookBeat highlights local Wisconsin authors and authors coming to Madison for book events. It airs every Monday afternoon at 1pm on WORT FM.

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Episodes
  • Cheryl Schiltz: When The World Falls Away: One Woman’s Triumph Over Invisible Disability

    Cheryl Schiltz: When The World Falls Away: One Woman’s Triumph Over Invisible Disability
    Nov 25 2025
    WORT 89.9FM Madison · Cheryl Schiltz - When the World Falls Away Lisa Malawski talks with Cheryl Schiltz today on Madison Bookbeat, November 24, 2025. Cheryl Schiltz is no stranger to silence—but not the peaceful kind. After a reaction to antibiotics destroyed her vestibular system—the part of the inner ear responsible for balance—Cheryl was plunged into a world of disorientation, instability, and invisible suffering. Even while lying down, she felt as if she were falling through space. The noise of disability wasn’t audible—it was internal, relentless, and isolating. In her powerful book, Silencing the Noise of Disability, Cheryl shares her deeply personal journey of loss, adaptation, and transformation. With raw honesty and poetic insight, she invites readers into the lived experience of invisible disability and the groundbreaking science that helped her reclaim her life. Through her collaboration with neuroscientist Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita and the use of the BrainPort device—a tool that rerouted balance signals through her tongue—Cheryl became a living example of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself. Her story was also featured in Norman Doidge’s bestselling book The Brain That Changes Itself, but in Silencing the Noise of Disability, Cheryl tells it in her own voice. “I didn’t just learn to walk again—I learned to live again.” This book is more than a memoir. It’s a call to recognize the dignity and complexity of those living with invisible disabilities. It’s a celebration of science, spirit, and the human will to adapt.
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    50 mins
  • Cary Segall, "A Walk in the Woods: Voices From the Appalachian Trail"

    Cary Segall, "A Walk in the Woods: Voices From the Appalachian Trail"
    Nov 17 2025
    Stu Levitan welcomes Cary Segall for a conversation about his engaging new book A Talk in the Woods: Voices Along the Appalachian Trail (Back Burner Books), recounting stories of the people he met along the world's longest hiking-only trail. Built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the mid-1930s, the 2,197.4-mile Appalachian Trail runs through 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine. More than three million people hike segments each year; fewer than one thousand earn the designation of thru-hiker, walking the entire trail within fifty-two weeks. Cary Segall set out in 2014 to become a thru-hiker, but soon took such enjoyment talking to his fellow hikers -- most with trail names like Deacon, Northstar, Birdman, Gearhead, Leave No Tracy, Mama Bear and the Cubs --that he took the time to interview them; every so often, he'd use the computer at a public library the trail was passing to write their stories. That slowed him down, so he only got to New York that first year; illness, injury and bad weather stymied his efforts in 2015-2017, but he finally summited in 2018. Impressive and no doubt satisfying, but nowhere near as extraordinary as what Segall, 75, accomplished on Nov. 9 – completing the Madison Marathon 26 days after a UW doctor replaced his defective aortic valve. That was on top of about 80 prior marathons in 31 states, plus a record 44 straight 20-mile Syttende Mai races. Segall began his racing and writing careers at Green Bay East High School, where he ran cross-country and was sports editor of the Hi-Light newspaper. He was also both a stringer and delivery boy for the Press Gazette, and delivered Vince Lombardi's Sunday Milwaukee Journal. Before joining the State Journal, Segall applied his UW degree in wildlife ecology as a ranger-naturalist for the National Park Service, and his UW law degree as a public interest environmental lawyer before quitting to raise his newborn son Craig, with whom he would later do much hiking.
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    54 mins
  • Emily Mitchell on the power of speculative fiction in strange times

    Emily Mitchell on the power of speculative fiction in strange times
    Nov 10 2025
    On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Emily Mitchell about her new short story collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, now available from University of Wisconsin Press. Delightfully blending literary fiction with speculative genres, the stories in The Church of Divine Electricity somehow manage to feel as though they could take place today. In Emily Mitchell’s created worlds, as in our own, technology bewitches, especially with its ability to heighten both connections and isolation. Whether being held by a giant and comforting machine, allowing micro-drones to record one’s every moment for a year to win prize money, or choosing self-mutilation in exchange for a bionic hand, these characters navigate technological and social change. The familiar can turn unrecognizable and disorienting—sometimes in a flash, sometimes gradually. Lyrical, haunting, and often funny, these stories ask us to consider what—and who—gets left out of a seemingly utopian future of technological advancements. Finely observed, thoughtful, and vivid, Mitchell’s stories get under your skin. It’s not that the best-laid plans could lead us astray—it’s that they may already have. Emily Mitchell, associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, is the author of a collection of short stories, Viral, and a novel, The Last Summer of the World. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Ploughshares, The Sun, and elsewhere; her nonfiction has been published in the New York Times, the New Statesman, and Guernica. She serves as fiction editor for the New England Review. Author photo by J.M. Tyree.
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    51 mins
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