This collection encompasses 50-plus years of interviews, readings, speeches, and reports on the vibrant literary scene in Minnesota. Not only home to giants F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis, our state has an array of incredible contemporary poets, novelists, and playwrights. Their words make up majority of this collection.
Repeatedly being named the “Most Literate City in the United States,” the Twin Cities has played host to numerous visiting national writers via book tours, festivals, and lectures. Many recordings of these are also included.
This project was funded by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
October 15, 1998 - Ten years ago, a young Harvard medical student published a book of short stories that became a national bestseller-it was Ethan Canin, whose collection Emperor of the Air earned him comparisons with writers Philip Roth and Robert Penn Warren. Since then, Canin has taken a leave from his medical career and turned to writing full time. He's now out with his second novel, For Kings and Planets, about two friends attending Columbia University in the seventies. The two are unlikely friends, one is an earnest Midwesterner, the other, a worldly, cynical risk-taker from the East Coast. Canin told Minnesota Public Radio's Tom Crann he's writing novels now instead of short stories because they're better for exploring complicated subjects.
October 29, 1998 - Live broadcast of the Westminster Town Hall Forum, featuring historian Iris Chang, author of "The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II". She has titled her Minneapolis speech, "The Silence of Nanking: Human Rights and World Ethics".
October 30, 1998 - Jeff Harrison, associate editor at Llewelyn Publishing, describes his prize winning costume in a company contest…Fate Magazine's alien abduction autopsy, with Harrison as one of the alien abductors. Employees at the downtown St. Paul publishing house take their contest very seriously.
November 3, 1998 - Live broadcast of the Carlson Lecture, featuring Nobel Peace Prize winner and Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. He is speaking at Northrop Auditorium at the University of Minnesota. Before the speech, MPR host Dan Olson will be speaking with Steven Feinstein, acting director of the University of Minnnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
November 10, 1998 - "Jackpine Bob" Cary, an author and amateur sledder from Ely, talks about the experience of dog sledding as the state's mushers and sled dogs are gearing up for another season of racing. Cary published a book on sled dogs titled "Born to Pull," which is also discussed.
November 16, 1998 - Logging isn't the job it used to be. A century ago, 30 thousand loggers were at work in the Minnesota woods. Today there are fewer than a thousand, using high-tech machines to supply the state's multi-billion dollar wood-products industry.
November 17, 1998 - Though old-growth forests were long gone, Minnesota's timber industry revived in the 1980s when new technology made the ubiquitous aspen tree a desired commodity. For a decade Minnesota had the fastest-growing timber trade in the country.
November 24, 1998 - St. Paul writer Patricia Hampl has received another big honor--She's won a Pushcart Prize for one of her short stories. Hampl is better known for her memoirs A Romantic Education and Virgin Time and her two volumes of poetry. In 1990 she received a McArthur Genius grant. The prize-winning story called "The Bill Collector's Vacation" originally appeared in the literary journal Ploughshares last fall. The Pushcart anthologies pull together the best stories, poems and essays published by small presses in a given year. Hampl says winning a Pushcart means a lot more people may actually read her story: Patricia Hampl's story "The Bill Collector's Vacation."
November 24, 1998 - St. Paul writer Patricia Hampl has received another big honor--She's won a Pushcart Prize for one of her short stories. Hampl is better known for her memoirs A Romantic Education and Virgin Time and her two volumes of poetry. In 1990 she received a McArthur Genius grant. The prize-winning story called "The Bill Collector's Vacation" originally appeared in the literary journal Ploughshares last fall. The Pushcart anthologies pull together the best stories, poems and essays published by small presses in a given year. Hampl says winning a Pushcart means a lot more people may actually read her story.
November 25, 1998 - Katherine Lanpher's guests after ten say men and women need not be in opposition. Join in when Katherine talks with Robert Bly and Marion Woodman, co-authors of the new book, "The Maiden King."