Author Ginger Strand read the first chapter of her latest book, The Brothers Vonnegut (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), at the 2015 Bread Loaf Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference.

Ginger Strand is the author of a novel and three books of narrative nonfiction, and has published essays and fiction in Harper’s, the New York Times, OnEarth, Tin House, The Believer, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor, and more. A former fellow in the Behrman Center for the Humanities at Princeton, Ginger has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Eisenhower Foundation, and the American Antiquarian Society, as well as residency grants from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She lives in New York City and the Catskill Mountains.

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Strand began, “The Brothers Vonnegut opens in 1945—it’s the story of two brothers and as the book opens the older brother, Bernard, is the success story in the family—he’s a famous research chemist—and he’s working on helping to de-ice the American bomber planes that are flying on their bombing missions in Germany and this is very top secret work and it’s going to lead him into a huge joint corporate and military attempt to control the weather that took place in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s in America. This is all true. I’m going to read from the very opening of the book, which finds the other brother—the younger brother—Kurt, at this moment in time.”