Lake Superior Writers taking over NEMBA
The Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards have a new organizing body, Lake Superior Writers. As a fan of NEMBA, the University of Minnesota Duluth and LSW, I think this is good news for all.
The Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards have a new organizing body, Lake Superior Writers. As a fan of NEMBA, the University of Minnesota Duluth and LSW, I think this is good news for all.
It looks like (from the Online Computer Library Center records and the books I found at Gabriel’s) Duluth Benedictine Books was a brief experiment in recording the lives and institutions of sisters who live at St. Scholastica. (I just finished a jar of strawberry rhubarb jam I purchased at their most recent jam sale — so yummy.)
I wonder whether this was a project fueled by one of the sisters? By someone determined to write down history or by someone who recognized that telling these stories could also help recruit for the sisterhood (whose numbers are dwindling)?
So, this is the last batch of records purchased at a $5 bag sale at Gabriel’s Books in Lakeside.
Yesterday was a “snow day,” meaning things were open, but my Kia Soul was not equipped to get me there while the snow fell on the ice. So I took a break from grading some excellent papers by my students to go over my next stack of records from Gabriels’s Used Bookstore in Lakeside.
Back in 2000 George Killough, then an English professor at the College of St. Scholastica, edited the book “Minnesota Diary, 1942-46” the journal of Sinclair Lewis during the time he lived in Duluth.
The Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health’s Great Lakes Hub in Duluth, located at 1915 South St. near the Duluth Labor Temple, just sent out an announcement of Indigenous Stories of Strength, a website collecting stories of life under COVID-19.
Once more through the trove of treasure from Gabriel’s Books in Lakeside. In addition to finding awesome old records and books, you should know, if you have kids: “All children, from birth to high school graduation, may pick out a book for free, each time they visit our store.” They are well-worth a visit.
The Library at the College of St. Scholastica, once a year, both weeds its collection and accepts donations (I presume from faculty and staff) for a sale. Popular reading starts at a dollar, I think — recent bestsellers. The rest starts at a quarter and slides, over a week, down to a dime, then to “free, just please take them.”
A recent panel on creative leadership really taught me a few things, so I’m sharing it with you all here. It featured local creative innovators and leaders Aryn Lee Bergsven, LeAnn Littlewolf and Hella Wartman.
The Zoom link in the poster is dead, but the panel can be found by clicking here.
I’ve struggled with how to blend a history of publishers in Duluth with a history of authors. It feels like that would widen my scope beyond the manageable. And then I find a book like this.
I’m looking for people attached to Poetry Harbor.
Google tells me that the late Patrick McKinnon (DNT spotlight here) was a founder, maybe? So was Ellie Schoenfeld?
Still working on building a literary history of Duluth. Has anyone information about “The Wordshed” as a Duluth publisher? I can only find:
Alaska: a man from Kanatak: the story of Paul Boskoffsky, by Paul Boskoffsky; Lloyd D Mattson; Harvey Sandstrom. The Wordshed, 2006. ©2002
Alaska: new life for an ancient people, by Lloyd D Mattson; Ruben Hillborn. The Wordshed, 1999. ©1999
I haunt the resale shops looking for “records that look like books.” I’m referring to the folios of LPs that were common (a) when prepackaged by the label, as a way to sell extended plays and collections when records didn’t hold too many songs and (b) when sold blank, as a way for an individual collector to store and carry multiple, individually-purchased discs.
When I find a collection stored in the sleeves of such a folio, I snatch it, wondering who collected these masterpieces.
