Aurora: An American Experience in Quilt, Community and Craft
by Jane Kirkpatrick

Summary

"If there are no quilting bees in heaven, I'm not going."

Like a master quilter, Jane Kirkpatrick has stitched together the story of a community from fragments left behind: letters, photographs, quilts, and other re-discovered treasures. Aurora tells the story of Old Aurora Colony, a utopian community founded in the mid 1800s in Oregon's lush Willamette Valley. Jane shows how the ordinary people of this community expressed their cherished beliefs and imagination through the work of their hands. The quilts the women came together to make speak of struggle and sacrifice but also of joy and journey.

For those who have ever wondered what lasts when they are gone, Aurora is an affirmation of the difference every ordinary life can make.

"I could barely wait for mother's friends to arrive with their flying fingers and loving spirit. Joyful chatter filled the house as I played under the bouncing quilt frame."

Buy Now - $17.99 | Jane Kirkpatrick Web Site

About the Author

Jane Kirkpatrick is a writer, speaker, teacher and mental health professional. Her award-winning essays, articles, and humor have appeared in over fifty publications such as Decision, Country and Daily Guideposts. She's written 14 novels and three non-fiction books including the Wrangler award-winning book A Sweetness to the Soul, a story inspired by a fifty-year old essay written by a Depression-era schoolboy. Her titles have been finalists for the Oregon Book Award, the Spur Award from Western Writers, Reader's Choice and the WILLA Literary Award of Women Writing the West. Literary Guild, Book of the Month, Doubleday Book Club and Crossings have chosen her books as main features or alternate selections. Her novel A Tendering in the Storm was named a Christy Finalist and won the WILLA Literary Award for Best Original Softcover Fiction for 2008.

Jane grew up on a Wisconsin dairy farm not far from the Mississippi River, in a network of a large extended family. Jane moved to Oregon in 1974 after completing her master's degree in social work. She became the director of the mental health program in Deschutes County, and later worked for seventeen years as a mental health and educational consultant on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon. For many years, and still today, she and her husband have homesteaded and ranched along the John Day River, "clearing sagebrush and wrestling wind and rattlesnakes" in a remote part of Oregon known locally as Starvation Point.

Jane believes that our lives are the stories that others read first. She encourages readers to discover the power of their own stories to heal and transform.

Buy Now - $17.99 | Jane Kirkpatrick Web Site