If you want to know how, read a novel that will be the focus of an online event featuring winners of the U.P. Notable Book List.

The Crystal Falls Community District Library, in partnership with the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association, has scheduled author events with winners of U.P. Notable Book List. The 15th event being with author Maryka Biaggio. Her novel, “Eden Waits,” is about a disastrous attempt to establish a faith-based utopian community in the U.P.

The Zoom event will begin at 7 p.m. March 10. Participants are asked to contact Evelyn Gathu in advance at egathu@uproc.lib.mi.us or 906-875-3344. The UPPAA recommends individuals borrow a copy of the book from a local library or purchase from a local bookseller in advance to fully experience the event.

U.P. Notable Book List events are open to all U.P. residents free of charge.

"Eden Waits" author Maryka Biaggio. (Photo courtesy of UPPAA)

According to UPPAA, Biaggio, who lives in Portland, Oregon, is a psychology professor turned novelist who specializes in historical fiction based on real people. A graduate from Marquette High School and Northern Michigan University, Doubleday published her debut novel, “Parlor Games,” in 2003.

“I enjoy the challenge of starting with actual people and dramatizing their lives — discovering what motivated them to behave as they did and recreating their emotional world through dialogue and action,” Biaggio says on her website at marykabiaggio.com. “I pride myself on crafting carefully researched and realistic fiction. I’m an avid opera fan and enjoy gardening, art films, and, of course, great fiction.”

Her fiction has won awards from Willamette Writers, Oregon Writers Colony and La Belle Lettre.

“Eden Waits,” based in the true story of a utopian community founded in the 1890s, was published by Sunbury Press in August 2019. The book was an Editors’ Choice in the February 2020 issue of The Historical Novels Review.

Biaggio’s website provides background on the novel.

“Eden Waits,” written by Maryka Biaggio, is the focus of the March 10 Zoom event featuring winners of the U.P. Notable Book List. The Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association holds these events in partnership with the Crystal Falls Community District Library. (Photo courtesy of UPPAA)

“In 1893 financial panic imperils the settlement homesteaded by Abraham and Elizabeth Byers,” it says. “Abraham, a preacher and self-proclaimed man of the people, rails against greed and corruption and launches Hiawatha Colony, a product-sharing community designed to support its members through self-sufficiency. But can this cooperative community withstand internal strife, the harsh wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and the antagonism of the outside world?

“When discord rocks the community, Abraham must choose between dissolving the colony and compromising the ideals that elevated him to its patriarch.”

Biaggio provided background on her research in an email to The Mining Journal.

“Researching and writing the novel ‘Eden Waits’ took two years and was an absolutely fascinating experience,” Biaggio said. “As it happens, the founders of the utopian community Hiawatha Colony are my ancestors –my great-great-great grandparents.”

She first learned of the colony in the 1990s while exploring her family’s genealogy.

“It was then that my mother, Phyllis Weber Biaggio, gave me her copy of ‘Utopia in Upper Michigan’ (Northern Michigan University Press, 1982), a scholarly depiction of the colony by Olive Anderson,” she said. “Ms. Anderson interviewed descendants of the colony and mined newspaper reports about it. She bequeathed her reference materials to the Marquette County Historical Society, and I reviewed all those materials and uncovered many gems about life in Hiawatha Colony.”

Biaggio also had access to photographs of people in the community and even a few of the letters that had been passed down through her grandmother, Gladys Chenord Weber.

“Of course, in the process of shaping the novel, I replaced many of the unknown daily events of their lives with my own imaginings,” Biaggio said. “My aim was not to create a factual rendering; inconsistencies abound even in first-person accounts of the colony,” she said. “Still, I have followed the general outline of the story as it has been passed down through time. As far as I can tell, there are no other novels that are based on actual utopian communities, which were not uncommon in 19th century America.

“I hope my novel provides a glimpse into this fascinating time in our country’s history.”

In the U.P. Book Review, regional author Donna Winters wrote about “Eden Waits.”

“The main characters were well drawn and complex,” Winters said. “They remained true to form until, with great skill, the author portrayed deviations unexpected but wholly believable. Some interpersonal relationships dissolved in the storms of community development, while others, built on more solid ground, weathered the crises and grew stronger, offering great reader satisfaction.

“Biaggio’s descriptions of settings put the reader squarely in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and in the shoes of her characters. I could see the counter and shelves lined with goods in the country store, sense the formality of the courtroom proceedings, smell the woodsy forest while traversing its path and feel the heat of the laundry tub as it began to boil.”

Biaggio’s website has this review of “Eden Waits,” written by local author John Smolens.

“America has a long history of attempts at creating Utopia, and ‘Eden Waits’ provides a gripping fictional account of one such community experiment which took place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in the late 19th century,” Smolens says. “Maryka Biaggio, a descendent of the founders of the community in the wilds of Schoolcraft County, brings to life the events that led to the development of Hiawatha Colony. This well-researched novel examines a lost chapter in our history, one that explores how our dreams are often compromised by our needs, and how our notions regarding family, work, faith lead to an insatiable and as yet unrequited desire to create a fair and equitable society.”

Established in 1998 to support authors and publishers who live in or write about the U.P., UPPAA is a Michigan nonprofit association with more than 100 members, many of whose books are featured on the organization’s website at www.uppaa.org. UPPAA welcomes participation and membership from anyone with a U.P. connection who is interested in writing.

Christie Mastric can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net.