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.
January 6, 2014 - MPR’s Dan Kraker reports on wild rice, the iconic grain that grows across much of the northern half of the state, being at the center of a contentious debate over mining and the environment. Kraker conducts interviews with individuals from both sides of the debate.
January 9, 2014 - Minnesota native Bob Dylan wrote the words for that song, "Temporary Like Achilles", on a sheet of paper now owned by the Minnesota Historical Society. Curator Patrick Coleman led our tour of their library stacks.
January 24, 2014 - It's a Friday in Minnesota, and that means tonight's a good time for a meat raffle.It may be a part of Minnesota culture, but to newcomers and out-of-towners, the meat raffle baffles. As "Eat, Pray, Love" author Elizabeth Gilbert observed in the New York Times after visiting a Brainerd meat raffle in 2006, "You know you're an outsider when something that seems perfectly normal to everyone else is impenetrably bizarre to you."Meat raffles are considered a form of legal gambling, and they're regulated in this state by the Minnesota Gambling Control Board. They are common in Minnesota and Wisconsin, as well as in Canada and England.
June 3, 2014 - For more than 20 years Bemidji writer Kent Nerburn has walked a fine line. He's tried to respectfully explore Native American culture as a white author.His books "Neither Wolf nor Dog" and "Wolf at Twilight," tell of his complex relationship with a Lakota elder named Dan. He's now completed the trilogy with "The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo" which delves into Native spirituality. Nerburn says it was also the most difficult of the trilogy to write. "In my own way, with such talents or such spiritual capabilities as I had, I prayed for guidance on this."As in the others in the series the new book tells of a road trip Nerburn takes with his friend Dan. Dan is a real person, a Lakota elder approaching the end of his life. Like all the characters in Nerburn's trilogy, though, Dan is not his real name. Nerburn has renamed everyone except himself.Dan is surrounded by a group of very protective friends and relatives. They regularly warn off Nerburn if they think he is getting too close, telling him he has no place in the native community. "The Girl Who Sang to the Buffalo" Courtesy New World LibraryHowever, for reasons Nerburn doesn't understand, Dan keeps pulling him back. The man needs to resolve some questions before he dies -- most importantly, what happened to his sister. She was taken to a boarding school and never returned. Dan wants Nerburn's help to find out what happened.In the first half of the 20th century the U.S. government placed thousands of native children in such schools. They were often far from their homes and families, and the experience scarred entire generations. In the new book, Nerburn writes about a place that may have been worse.
June 6, 2014 - In a small park near the Cathedral in St. Paul, a crowd of children and adults sit in front of a puppet theater.They plopped down on the grass to see "Tucker's Robot," a high-energy slapstick tale of two pals who decide to build a robot. The show is part of the Driveway Tour by Open Eye Figure Theatre, which began 11 years ago as a practical solution to a sticky problem.
July 15, 2014 - On this Appetites segment, Tom Crann interviews Minnesota author Beth Dooley about the various food offerings of Hmong growers at farmers markets in the Twin Cities.
July 23, 2014 - We air Kerri Miller's conversation with novelist Elizabeth Gilbert earlier this month at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul.Gilbert's latest book, "The Signature of All Things," is a sprawling tale of 19th century botanical exploration.Gilbert is best known for her 2006 memoir "Eat Pray Love," which chronicled her journey alone around the world, looking for solace after a difficult divorce. The book was an international bestseller, translated into over thirty languages, with over 10 million copies sold worldwide.In 2010, "Eat Pray Love" was made into a film starring Julia Roberts. The book became so popular that Time Magazine named Gilbert as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.This is the 15th season of Talking Volumes.
August 5, 2014 - In her new novel, "Everything I Never Told You," novelist Celeste Ng quickly plunges readers into the depths of a family tragedy.Late one night, after the Lee family spends a seemingly normal evening filled with the tiny joys of parents and children, 16-year-old Lydia in a pond near the family home. No one in her family, the author tells her readers, will remember their fleeting moments of happiness."Instead they will dissect this last evening for years to come," Ng writes. "What did they miss that they should have seen? What small gesture forgotten might have changed everything? They will pick it down to the bones wondering how this had all gone so wrong, and they will never be sure."In "Everything I Never Told You" Ng explores misery of losing a child, while also using uses the story to examine the challenges of a mixed family in the Midwest during the 1970s, a time when interracial marriages and their offspring made attracted unwelcome and sometimes hostile attention. She will read from the novel at 7 p.m. Tuesday at the Magers and Quinn Bookstore in Minneapolis.Ng said the book grew out of a story her husband told her about a little girl he knew who nearly drowned when she fell in a lake. The story touched Ng because of her own fears of the water, and she began writing about the implications for the family. As she wrote, the story developed and became about a lot more.In writing the novel, Ng, 33, began drawing on her own background as an Asian-American who grew up in Pittsburgh and in the Shaker Heights, Ohio, area near Cleveland. But she decided to set the story in the 1970s. "That seemed like a very poignant era to me," Ng said. "For her to see her daughter have a lot of opportunities that for her had maybe now passed."
August 19, 2014 - With the announcement of author Louise Erdrich winning National Book Award for book “The Round House,” The Daily Circuit presents a rebroadcast of a 2012 interview with Erdrich about her book. The novel tells the story of a crime on a North Dakota reservation in 1988.
September 12, 2014 - A new production called "Marcus; Or the secret of sweet" opens this weekend at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It tells the story of a young man wrestling with his identity as he comes of age in a small town in the Louisiana bayou.