Join Michael Punke, New York Times bestselling author, and Aubrey Jaap, Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives Director, for a fireside chat about Punke’s Fire and Brimstone, the remarkable story of the worst hard-rock mining disaster in American history. In conversational style, Jaap will talk with Punke about his reasoning for writing Fire and Brimstone, his research process, and other discoveries he made along the way.

Fire and Brimstone recounts the remarkable stories the North Butte Mining Disaster of 1917, of both the men below ground and their families above, focusing on two groups of miners who made the incredible decision to entomb themselves to escape the gas. While the disaster is compelling in its own right, Fire and Brimstone also tells a far broader story striking in its contemporary relevance. Butte, Montana, on the eve of the North Butte disaster, was a volatile jumble of antiwar protest, an abusive corporate master, seething labor unrest, divisive ethnic tension, and radicalism both left and right. It was a powder keg lacking only a spark, and the mine fire would ignite strikes, murder, ethnic and political witch hunts, occupation by federal troops, and ultimately a battle over presidential power.

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Michael will sign autographs of his book after the workshop; his book will also be available for purchase at Isle of Books, How Novel, Second Edition Books, and the Corner Bookstore.