You will find great skiing along the Gunflint.  The entire 41 kilometer Banadad Trail system is now tracked and open for skiing.  Located at the eastern end of the Banadad is Poplar Creek Guesthouse B&B. The guesthouse also operate’s the Banadad Yurts and two ski-in cabins along the trail. According to skiers just returning from [...]

There is something so delicious about scandalous lit from 1911. To wit: The beginning of Jennie Gerhardt by Theodore Dresier had me cackling like a fourteen-year-old boy. The Gerhardt’s are in the muck. Pa Gerhardt has been sick and unable to work. There are a handful of kids that need shoes and bacon. Mrs. Gerhardt [...]

What if God were a horny teenage boy whose libido causes natural disasters? That’s the premise behind Meg Rosoff’s There is No Dog. God, or Bob, falls in love with a beautiful human, and the more he tries to have sex with her the more his emotions mess with our weather. One day it’s torrential [...]

Reading Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron just hours after seeing the movie “Melancholia”: If you can sludge through the slo-mo setup to the movie, the first what-say ten minutes of abstract imagery involving horses tilting to a seated position and the ankle-deep muck of footprints across a putting green, you can [...]

Before I go gushy fangirl a few facts: You can see/hear Dylan Hicks read from Boarded Windows part of Coffee House Press’ Biblio Bash at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 5. They have a ton going on & you should follow that there link to get all the details. If you’re busy on Saturday you can [...]

It’s the summer of 1983 and Carmen is a red-dressed bride, a little pregnant and reluctant to join her new husband Matt on the dance floor, where he is awkwardly performing a hat dance. Her brother Nick is in a loft at the hippie farm commune. He’s wearing a white wedding dress, his date Olivia [...]

Minnesota Meeting with Wendy Kopp of Teach For America from Minneapolis Foundation on Vimeo.

Lanesboro looks good in snow.  We received a fresh covering in the past week that has transformed the Root River valley into a winter wonderland.  The Root River Trail is groomed for cross country skiing for over 20 miles.  There are also two great snowshoe trails nearby.   Schedule your two night winter getaway at the [...]

Twelve inches of snow now on the Ground after another three inches fell last night. The Gunflint’s Nordic trails are open. Along the Banadad Ski Trail System ten kilometers of trails are tracked on the eastern end. The BWCA longest tracked trail the Banadad has been packed and plans are to track the entire trail [...]

Mr. Moosewood, AKA Moose, a popular stoner-hippie teacher — ponytail and all — assigns the students in his AP elective a semester-long project of self-discovery that asks “Who are you and who are you becoming?” Fifteen-year-old Tina M. decides to keep a diary during the semester, letters to John-Paul Sartre, in Tina’s Mouth: An Existential [...]

Janie takes her role as eldest daughter seriously in Forgotten Country, Catherine Chung’s debut novel about a family that comes to the United States out-running potential political persecution in their home country, Korea. Hannah, her younger sister, has a bit more moxie. When the family’s traditions start to weigh her down, she runs away to [...]

Sunday as I finished Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail I kind of sighed sadly and wished this book had been around when I was a young twentysomething woman. While the story is uniquely Strayed’s the meaning, the lesson, the whathaveyou feels universal. Mostly it’s this: you are [...]

I read memoirs because it is more polite than staring at people, which doesn’t mean I do the latter any less. I like the what-has-it-been-like-for-you-ness of seeing someone’s bullet points and knowing it must all turn out reasonably okay, because they were able to pop a squat and push out these thousands of words afterward. [...]

I’m going go right ahead and put Jane Beckles right up on a pedestal next to Ramona Flowers & Zero Hopeless-Savage. These pedestals are reserved for kickass, young, female characters from graphic novels. After I complained last week about how difficult it is to find graphic novels written by women, LeAnn called on her posse [...]

It’s 1622. It’s 1902. It’s 2000 in Danielle Sosin’s debut novel The Long-Shining Waters the story of three women living on Lake Superior. Grey Rabbit lives with her two sons, husband, and mother-in-law in the winter of 1622 on the shore of Lake Superior and it’s been rough hunting and everyone is starving. Meanwhile, she’s [...]

If you want to see a Hunger Games-head combust, tell the fan that you read book one, dug it enough, but haven’t read any others in the series. Then back away slowly. There are going to be octaves involved. According to Emily Post, one is supposed to read the first book and then light the [...]

I was robbed by a British author. Not cool, Ali Smith. The masses were bleating favorably about the novel There But For The and frankly the premise seemed so intriguing: A man at a dinner party with a collection of strangers gets up, goes upstairs, and locks himself in a spare room — luckily one [...]

It starts with a young James Wolcott riding a ref from Norman Mailer to the grunts of the Village Voice offices. One of those “I like how you write, if you’re ever in NYC, stop by X and ask for Y and he’ll hook you up” scenarios Wolcott took seriously enough to drop out of [...]

Democracy, spiral staircases, roasted-meat-filled pita bread with tzatziki sauce, and Homer. The Greeks are certainly not short on gifts provided to the world at large. But let’s focus our attention on last of the list, the “Blind Bard,” or “Father of Western Literature,” Homer. Bro wrote two books (The Iliad and The Odyssey) and is [...]

I’ve fallen off the graphic novel bandwagon. Hard. It kind of hurts. I miss graphic novels, but I’m sick of all the dudeness in the graphical realm. That’s putting it mildly. It’s the kind of sick that makes my stomach fill with acid and my cheeks flush red with anger. Why is it so damn [...]

Come stay with us at the Deutsche Strasse Bed and Breakfast on April 20 & 21, in New Ulm, Minnesota, and enjoy a limo ride to destinations to enjoy tasting wines and beers produced in South Central Minnesota.  Our first stop will be in Redwood Falls, MN, at the Fieldstone Winery, for tastings and history [...]

Brian Selznick is so talented, it’s sickening. Seriously, could he make the rest of us feel even more inadequate? He can weave a great tale, but he can also draw beautifully. Thanks, Selznick, for making me feel like crap. But, yes, thank you for also making me love the stories you tell. I only read [...]

I remember the moment Jeanette Winterson entered my life. It was the summer of 1995, upstairs in a dusty used-bookstore called The Book Peddler in downtown Eau Claire, Wisconsin. I was lost somewhere in the philosophy stacks when my friend Anderla came over holding a paperback reverently in her hands. “You have to read this,” [...]

There were times in the midst of reading Arcadia by Lauren Groff where I thought to myself, “I would totally love to live in a commune.” But then I would close the cover of the book and remember that I’m an angry hermit. It’s not that Groff paints the commune as a halcyon of hippiedom, [...]

Joe R. Lansdale wrote my favorite short story in the Stories: All-New Tales collection, so when I saw a library display featuring a young adult novel by him, I didn’t even read the book jacket before I checked it out. When I was only ten pages into All the Earth, Thrown to the Sky, I [...]