Book Launch: Linda LeGarde Grover Presents A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids

Zenith Bookstore presents the launch of Linda LeGarde Grover’s new novel A Song Over Miskwaa Rapids (University of Minnesota Press). Joining Linda in conversation will be Staci Lola Drouillard, author of Seven Aunts. The exciting author discussion will take place at Zeitgeist Teatro, 222 E Superior St, Duluth. Linda’s new book will be released on Nov. 7th, and can be preordered at zenithbookstore.com/grover .

Beginning with her award-winning story collection The Dance Boots and continuing with her novels The Road Back to Sweetgrass and In the Night of Memory, Grover has created and explored the imaginary Mozhay Point Ojibwe Reservation in northern Minnesota.

In her new book, a 50-year-old mystery converges with a present-day struggle over family, land, and history. When a rock is dislodged from its slope by mischievous ancestors, the past rises to meet the present, and Half-Dime Hill gives up a gruesome secret it has kept for half a century. Some people of Mozhay Point have theories about what happened; others know — and the discovery stirs memories long buried, reviving a terrible story yet to be told.

Throughout the narrative, a chorus of spirit women gather in lawn chairs with coffee and cookies to reminisce, reflect, and speculate, spinning the threads of family, myth, history, and humor — much as Grover spins another tale of Mozhay Point, weaving together an intimate and complex novel of a place and its people.

Linda LeGarde Grover is professor emerita of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her books The Road Back to Sweetgrass, Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, In the Night of Memory, and Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong have earned numerous awards. Her book of stories The Dance Boots received the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her memoir Gichigami Hearts was the One Book Northland read in 2022.

Staci Lola Drouillard, a descendant of the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Anishinaabe, lives and works in her hometown of Grand Marais, Minnesota, on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Her first book, Walking the Old Road: A People’s History of Chippewa City and the Grand Marais Anishinaabe won the Hamlin Garland Prize in Popular History and the Northeast Minnesota Book Award for nonfiction. Her most recent book Seven Aunts is an unconventional portrait of family and women’s lives in northern Minnesota and winner of the 2023 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction.