September 18, 1997 - Jane Kenyon was an essayist and poet who published several collections of work and contributed to the New Yorker and Atlantic magazines. Kenyon wrote about many things including her own battle with depression. MPR's Steven Smith talked with Kenyon in 1994 for his documentary "A Suffering Mind". During that interview, she read poem "Woodthrush."
September 18, 1997 - MPR’s Greta Cunningham talks with poet Donald Hall about his wife and fellow poet Jane Kenyon, who passed away in 1995. Hall reads Kenyon’s poem “The Needle.”
September 22, 1997 - It's yellow, has a hole punched in the upper left hand corner, and has been in continuous publication for more than two-hundred years. It's the Old Farmer's Almanac. The hole was for the nail in the outhouse wall, and a brief unscientific office poll discovered that the modern inside bathroom might be a frequent resting place for the modern Almanac.
September 23, 1997 - No representation of England would be complete without The Union Jack, horse racing, and soccer. And, fittingly, British artist Mark Wallinger's exhibit at the Fiterman Gallery in Minneapolis includes these symbols, but not exactly like you'd expect. The jockeys are faceless, the Union Jack has "Mum" scrawled across it, and a model soccer field sits atop a tomb. Another prominent symbol: a pantomime horse, which Wallinger says has its origins in children's holiday plays.
September 25, 1997 - MPR’s Chris Roberts interviews Bob Hest and Steve Kramer, two ex-members of the experimental group The Wallets. Hest and Kramer discuss their new career of merging music into advertising campaigns.
September 26, 1997 - The Hennepin History Museum is re-opening to the public this weekend. It's been closed for sixteen months, while board members scurried to secure a future and funding for the 39-year old museum. Susan Larsen-Fleming is one of the board members who rolled up her sleeves during those months and took care of the collection. She says the shutdown had one benefit.
October 1, 1997 - In his new novel "Floating Kingdom", Minneapolis writer George Rabasa tells the story of a family living on a tiny island in the middle of the Rio Grande, smack in the middle of the border between the U.S. and Mexico. The patriarch Seguila makes his living guiding illegal immigrants across the border; his son-in-law makes his living robbing those same people. One day Seguilo and his grandson come across the battered form of a teenager from north of the border, who has run afoul of bandits. "Floating Kingdom" is about a family on the edge, on the edge of two nations, and the edge of survival.
October 2, 1997 - MPR’s Chris Roberts presents a report on The Jayhawks, who have decided to stay together and embark down a new musical path with album, "Sound of Lies." Roberts interviews band members Gary Louris and Marc Perlman about that new musical journey.
October 3, 1997 - An October edition of our "Voices of Minnesota" series, featuring two Minnesota stars in the music world, singer and Broadway performer Linda Eder; and violinist and jazz musician Clifford Brunzell.
October 13, 1997 - In the two decades since their arrival in the United States, the Hmong have established themselves as a part of America's ethnic landscape. They've created businesses, festivals, and radio and t-v programs. But perhaps one area in which they've been slower to integrate is medicine. There are just a handful of Hmong doctors nationwide, possibly due to their relatively short tenure in the United States. But Journalist Anne Fadiman points out it could also be attributed to the vast gulf between traditional Hmong medicine and Western medicine. Fadiman followed a California family who had a disastrous experience when their daughter Lia began having epileptic seizures. Her story is told in a new book called "The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors and the Collision of Two Cultures"