Support
While founding director Thordis Niela Simonsen endowed the creation of the Museum of Authenticity, its future depends on the generosity of its valued patrons! You can support the Museum by making a contribution via the support page of the Museum shop. Or you might prefer to give in one of the following ways—
PURCHASE Thordis’ creative nonfiction books, graphic notecards, and/or archival ink prints at the Museum Shop .
Thordis Niela Simonsen’s first book, You May Plow Here: The Narrative of Sara Brooks, is the rich first-person account of an African-American woman’s childhood life on the mule-farm her father owned in central Alabama. The book was featured on the front page of The Chicago Tribune’s Sunday Bookworld. [It is currently out of print.] One reviewer described the vignettes in Thordis’ second book, Dancing Girl: Themes and Improvisations in a Greek Village Setting as “genuine encounters.” The text and photographs were funded in part by a grant from the Ella Lyman Cabot Trust. Thordis’ third book, Dances in Two Worlds: A Writer-Artist’s Backstory, contains twenty personal essays that set the stage for the fifty paintings published alongside the text. Completed with a grant from the John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund, the book won the Colorado Book Award for creative nonfiction and the praise of Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way.
Thordis began making and selling graphic notecards in 2016 to promote and support the Museum. At a few dollars per card, only very brisk sales will add up to the cost of insuring and maintaining the Museum, but the cards are a joy to send and a joy to receive. If you appreciate the artwork published on her websites, contact Thordis for the complete catalog of available archival ink reproductions. Visit the Museum Shop.
INVITE Thordis to make a presentation at your book club, a house party you host, or an organization you are affiliated with.
Thordis is an engaging speaker/facilitator—so much so that one book club invited her three different times, once for each of her three different titles. So much so that the Denver Museum of Natural History and Vanderbilt’s women’s studies department invited her to speak on two occasions, Colorado State University’s women’s studies program, Women At Noon, invited her to speak on three separate occasions, and a professor from Norway arranged for her to make presentations to nine schools in Stavanger.
TRAVEL in Greece with a small group of like-spirited individuals.
astragreece inc. has been hosting intimate small-group excursions in Greece since 1995. Participants enjoy the flexibility and the variety built into the itineraries. Hence several clients have traveled with astragreece inc. on four separate occasions to four different regions of Greece.