Mardi link biography

About the author Mardi Link was.
MARDI JO LINK is the author of Bootstrapper, When Evil Came to Good Hart (2008) and Isadore’s Secret (2009), winner of the Michigan Notable Book Award.
Mardi Jo Link is the award-winning author of two memoirs and three true crime books including Bootstrapper, a memoir of single-motherhood, rural life.

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Mardi Jo Link’s memoir Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm was #14 on the Michigan Bestseller List in October. She spoke to us about some of her other projects, too.

Tell us a little about your book and how it came to be?

Wicked Takes the Witness Stand is the true account of a botched murder investigation and the crushing wave of criminal trials that swept up several innocent men up. In Dec. of 1986, an oilfield worker was found frozen in the back of his pick-up truck in downtown Gaylord. Because of a botched autopsy, a tunnel vision police investigation, a blindly ambitious prosecution, and one extremely crazy so-called witness, five men went to prison for something that was probably a drug overdose. If you go to Gaylord today and ask about this case, most people will say the men beat a murder rap. They didn’t, they were innocent and their lives were ruined. That’s why I wrote the book.

After my other two crime books, When Evil Came to Good Hart (2008), and Isadore’s Secret (2009) were published, people started contacting me about o

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Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm

June 8, 2013

Bootstrapper: to promote or develop by initiative and effort with little or no assistance --- Merriam-Webster dictionary.

Mardi Jo Link is living the life she always dreamed of - three amazing young sons and the opportunity to raise them in the countryside in a beautiful old farmhouse sitting on six acres. And yes, there was a husband too - but with divorce now a certainty, Mardi Jo is determined to hang onto her sons, her house and her land - by herself.

"I'm claiming my sons, the farm, the debt, the other debt, the horses, the dogs, and the land. I'm claiming our century-old farmhouse, the garden, the woods, the pasture, the barn, and the Quonset-hut garage. They're all mine now, and this is how I will raise my boys: on cheerful summer days and well water and BB guns and horseback riding and dirt. Because I'm claiming our whole country life, the one I've been dreaming of and planning out and working for since I was a little girl."

And this is where the bootstrapping comes into play -for Link is work

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The tradition that keeps a fierce frienship together

In 1993, Mardi Jo Link was a 31-year-old wife and mother of two and a bar waitress with a college degree. Just before sunrise on an October Michigan morning, Link and three friends set off on what would become an annual get-the-hell-out-of-Dodge adventure to the isolated refuge of Drummond Island on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. In 1993, Link was the newest member of the sorority, but she eventually became the chronicler of the highs and lows of the annual island weekend.

In The Drummond Girls, Link proceeds roughly year-by-year as the conclave grows from four to eight, and as each of the friends passes through the peaks and valleys of life, from marriage and divorce to birth and death, including the sudden death of one of their own, Mary Lynn.

Link regales readers with tales of nights and days spent exploring the North woods, running into some of the island’s more colorful inhabitants—both animal and human—and bonding deeply with a group of women who, as Link says, would “do ninety days at a min