READING & BOOK SIGNING
Brad Orsted & Maggie Anderson
Wheatgrass will host Brad Orsted, author of Through The Wilderness, and Maggie Anderson, author of Between Rock and A Hard Place, for a reading, signing, and conversation on Thursday, September 28th at 7 PM.
Through The Wilderness: My Journey of Redemption and Healing in the American Wild
When Brad Orsted’s fifteen-month-old daughter, Marley, tragically and mysteriously died at his mother’s home, he descended into madness. There was an investigation, autopsy, and eventual charges, yet Marley’s cause of death remained inconclusive. Blaming himself, he plunged into an abyss of grief, guilt, and self-recrimination, fueled by prescription drugs and alcohol. For the next almost two years Brad wanted and tried to die too while his wife, Stacey, searched for a new beginning. She finally found a job in Yellowstone National Park and, with their daughters, the pair fled Michigan looking for refuge and redemption in the 2.2 million acres of glorious American wilderness.
THROUGH THE WILDERNESS: My Journey of Redemption and Healing in the American Wild (St. Martin’s Press; June 27, 2023; $29.00 hardcover) by Award-winning Yellowstone photographer and documentary filmmaker Brad Orsted begins in Yellowstone, five months after the family’s arrival, when, in an alcoholic haze, Brad stumbled into a field of sage and comes face-to-face with an adult male grizzly bear. Against all odds, Brad survives and comes to the realization that he wants to live-he just didn’t know how.
Desperate for help, Brad invited himself to a Crow sweat lodge ceremony, where an elder told him it was time to stop grieving. The elder’s words started Brad on a journey towards sobriety and inner peace, only possible because of lessons he learned in the wild, his new job as a wildlife photographer and filmmaker, and two orphaned grizzly cubs who carried him back home and taught him how to live again.
Brad’s ten-year odyssey is about finding the wild inside the human heart. It is a journey of the spirit- a journey to forgiveness and sobriety, to love and life, to memory, and ultimately, to Marley.
THROUGH THE WILDERNESS is a gripping tale of redemption and courage, as Orsted reinvents his life in the wake of loss and grief, and depicts the healing powers of the wild and the redemptive nature of the human spirit.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Brad Orsted’s instinct for storytelling started early when someone gave him a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera as a child. Decades later Brad’s passion for wildlife cinematography and photography would not only earn him work with top networks like: Nat Geo Wild, The BBC, PBS, Nature, and The Smithsonian Channel, but also become part of his recovery after the tragic death of his daughter, Marley. Brad now resides in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he is hard at work on his second book and his wilderness therapy programs also called, Through the Wilderness. Brad’s film with Jeff Bridges and Doug Peacock, “The Beast of Our Time” recently won Best Environmental Film Award at the prestigious L.A. Doc Film Festival.