Sonja Swift at Milkweed Books

Join us as Milkweed Books welcomes Sonja Swift for a reading of her new book Echo Loba, Loba Echo: Of Wisdom, Wolves, and Women, a unique look at the cultural, environmental, historical, literary, metaphorical, and political role of the wolf. Sonja will read from Echo Loba, Loba Echo and be joined in conversation by local author Winona LaDuke, followed by time for audience questions and a book signing.

Enjoy a social hour in our brick-and-mortar indie bookstore, Milkweed Books, beginning at 5 p.m., followed by the reading and conversation beginning at 6 p.m.

About the book

Echo Loba, Loba Echo is a story about the metaphor of the wolf and how this is echoed in the lives and minds of people. A metaphor that embodies worldviews colliding, and the collision, the fallout, we live with still. It is a story about wolves’ own cultures, survival stories, acts of rebellion, and vital roles in maintaining healthy territories. And it is also a story about what we have been told to forget, or never even know, and what wolves show us about ourselves.

Through essay and poetry, the metaphor of the wolf, and loba – for she-wolf – is examined the way one might observe the light off a prism, in multi-dimensional ways. The associations are many and diametrically varied. Wolf as scapegoat, villain, outcast, blamed for human violence. Wolf as warrior, guide, mother to stray or orphaned children as well as her own pups. The Ojibwe word for wolf is ma’iingan: the one sent here by that all-loving spirit to show us the way. Wolf (Latin: lupus), which is another word for whore (lupa), for woman. Wolf, another word for backcountry. Yet the choice is not an easy duality, not simply between the notion of wolf as heroine or wolf as devil.

About the speakers

is a writer and poet of hybrid forms. She has published a range of poems, as well as various articles and photo essays. Alumna of California College of the Arts, she is the author of Alphabet Atlas, a chapbook of prose poems published by Deconstructed Artichoke Press, and Tarot of Transformation, a series of vignettes published by True Story. Sonja is Danish American and comes from dusty, sometimes emerald, coastal hills, amid a chain of old volcanic peaks that stretch into the Pacific Ocean. Echo Loba, Loba Echo: Of Wisdom, Wolves, and Women is her first book.

is an Anishinaabe writer, farmer and economist. She is the author of the novel Last Standing Woman, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, Recovering the Sacred: The Power of Naming and Claiming, The Militarization of Indian Country, The Sugar Bush, The Winona LaDuke Reader, and To Be A Water Protector: The Rise of the Wiindigoo Slayers. She lives and works on the White Earth Reservation in northern Minnesota.

Host or Publisher Milkweed Books