CONVERSATIONS
Words, Women and Wine Madonna
Growing up in tiny Big
Bend, Wisconsin – the
local kids lovingly
referred to their
hometown as “Large
Lump” – Kris Radish was
desperate for a way out.
At the age of 12, she
started crafting a plan. “I
was an avid reader – and I
was like ‘Oh my God, the
world is bigger than Big
Bend! How can I parlay
my love of reading into
the rest of my life?’” She
was 15 when she left
home.
Fiercely independent, she
of the family to attend
college, paying for it
herself via a series of odd
jobs, ultimately earning
a degree in journalism
from the University of
Wisconsin. Five decades, an astonishingly varied career and 15
books later, Kris Radish is the co-owner of Wine Madonna, the
also mentors up-and-coming writers, sponsors literary events
and hosts book club meetings.
She titled her 2014 collection of autobiographical essays
“Gravel on the Side of the Road: True Stories from a Broad Who
Has Been There.”
Radish’s lengthy career as a writer, editor, bureau chief and
columnist, much of it spent in Utah, was the gateway drug that
The 80-hour work weeks wore her down. The constant travel.
exposing the peculiar kind of corruption that exists in the
Mormon church, going on one violent ride-along after another
with the local cops, getting stalked, bullied, threatened. That
go to law school – because that’s what I was doing anyway,”
34 StPeteLifeMag.com January/February 2019
“I was also teaching
part-time at Brigham
Young University,
and then I taught
at the University of
Wisconsin.”
entertained a
second career as a
psychologist. “My
job, my whole life,
has been getting
people to tell me the
things they didn’t
want to tell me. I
could have gotten
both of these degrees
for free, because I
was teaching.’”
But no. She was a
writer.
Bring on the books
“If any writer tells you they don’t want to write a novel, they’re
lying through their teeth,” she says. “One day you’re sitting
there thinking ‘My God – I went to Bosnia, I was almost killed,
saw that little boy get killed by a train – and I had to knock on
narrative about a notorious Milwaukee murder. “But what about
all that emotion you have, about loss and love and death? Not
to mention the fact that I am a woman, and I write about what
these novels.”
Gathering of White Snows,” arrived in 2002.
Six years later, Radish and her partner Madonna Metcalf
devised a plan of their own. “Madonna came into my life when
my kids were younger, and helped me, and when the kids got
into college it was her turn,” Radish explains. “And her dream
had always been to open up a wine bar.”
Kris Radish
BY BILL DEYOUNG
ST. PETE
/StPeteLifeMag.com