News & Announcements

Women's National Book Association

Monday, March 14 at 6:30pm at Northwest School of the Arts in Charlotte

Jim will be the guest of Nancy Gutierrez, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UNC Charlotte.


Barnes and Noble Book Signing

Thursday, March 24 at 5pm

Jim will be signing books at the Barnes and Noble bookstore on UNC Charlotte's campus (in the new student union building). Please stop by for a visit and to have your book signed.


College Bookshop Signing

Wednesday, July 20 from 1pm-3pm

The author will be signing books at Cottage Bookshop in Glen Arbor, Michigan. Please stop by for a visit and to have your book signed.


Leelanau Books

Sunday, July 24 from 1pm-3pm

The author will be signing books at Leelanau Books in Leland Michigan. Please stop by for a visit and have your book signed.


Horizon Books

Thursday, July 28 from 3pm-5pm

Stop by and have your book signed at Horizon Books in Traverse City Michigan.


In the Shadow of the Bear, A Michigan Memoir

In the Shadow of the Bear chronicles the author's return, after a forty-year absence, to the site of his childhood summer vacations at Little Glen Lake in northwestern Lower Michigan's Leelanau peninsula.

The ancient Ojibwa legend that gave a name to the area's most striking geographical feature, the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes, offers a way of understanding his mother's powerful but sometimes restless force of love and ambition in the family, as well as his father's quieter, often self-sacrificing love. Chapters devoted to the return to Leelanau, to each of his parents, and to his father's family culminate in the narrative of his daughter's 2005 Leelanau wedding.

Jim McGavran tells his story of self- discovery in prose that is alternately frank and lyrical as he recaptures his bewildered yet enchanted boyhood self, filtered through his consciousness of longing and loss, lending the writing a particular poignancy.


In the Shadow of the Bear A Michigan Memoir