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.
December 22, 2009 - Say what you will about the frivolity of the holiday buying season, Minneapolis poet Todd Boss has discovered a new reason to indulge in mechanical marble-tumble toys.
December 22, 2009 - Essayist Peter Smith shares a story about one of his favorite Christmas memories… about a man named Mr. Dinklenberg.
January 1, 2010 - Playwright and humorist Kevin Kling talks about his new book, "Holiday Inn," which he calls "a romp through a year of holidays." Kling spoke at the Minneapolis Central Library as part of the library's Talk of the Stacks program.
January 5, 2010 - January's arrival has some of us thinking about New Year's resolutions.... or cursing the cold. But it has essayist Peter Smith contemplating his own mortality. Mortality, and an old sofa.
January 12, 2010 - The battle is on for the smartest smartphone. Apple's iPhone and Google's new "Nexus One" are competing for the hearts and dollars of this year's phone buyers. But with so many phones out there, commentator Peter Smith is starting to notice some side effects.
January 14, 2010 - MPR’s Tom Crann interviews sports columnist Jim Klobucahar about the history on rivalry of Minnesota Vikings and Dallas Cowboys.
January 14, 2010 - Miep Gies, the woman who helped hide Anne Frank from the Nazis and later saved Anne's diary, died this week in Amsterdam. She was 100 years old. Midday features a remembrance of Gies, plus an excerpt from an interview with Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel.
January 15, 2010 - There's a memorial service at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. today for former Pioneer Press executive editor Deborah Howell. She was hit by a car and killed in New Zealand earlier this month. Howell led the paper to two Pulitzer Prizes in the 1980s. She later went on to Washington and was most recently the ombudsman for the Washington Post. New York Times columnist David Carr says Howell cut her teeth in the tough, male-dominated newspaper business at an early age
February 16, 2010 - Willa Cather's "My Antonia" captured the beauty of the prairie and the hardscrabble existence of European immigrants on the Nebraska plains. The author of a new stage adaptation of the novel, and a Cather scholar, talk about why the story still resonates.
February 24, 2010 - Award-winning Minnesota history author Dave Kenney discusses the history of the Boy Scouts in central Minnesota and western Wisconsin. Kenney is out with a book on the subject, entitled Honor Bright: A Century of Scouting in Northern Star Council. Kenney also answers listener questions.