All posts tagged: Minnesota

KATHERINE MAY’S NYT BESTSELLER: WINTERING & HOW IT RELATES TO A PERIOD OF TIME IN MY LIFE

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By Leslie Lindsay How does one care for and repair ourselves when we find ourselves slipping through the cracks? ~NONFICTION SPOTLIGHT|ALWAYS WITH BOOK~ NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A meditation in what it means to winter, this intimate, part-memoir, part exploration, part essay, WINTERING by Katherine May (Riverhead, November 2020) explores all the ways winter is a lesson in self-care, healing, and rejuvenation. I once believed I could live in the northern climate of Minnesota. My mother scoffed, “It’s one of the coldest places we have in the U.S. Why would you want to go there?”  Simple: I had a job at the Mayo Clinic. I also wanted to get away from my wildly unstable, mentally ill mother. Still, her warning, her motherly instinct to shelter me from the harsh realities of a 6-8 month long winter, was somewhat…comforting. As children had been doing for eons, I defied her. I moved to Minnesota. Encapsulated in the snowy drifts and what I am sure was my first real blizzard, I hunkered down. I sat in the bay …

Kendra Atleework talks about personal loss & shared loss, homesickness, what it means to leave a place & return, loving her high desert home, and so much more in her memoir MIRACLE COUNTRY

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By Leslie Lindsay  A rare and powerful memoir combing aspects of travel, history, environmental writing with autobiography and told in luminous prose. ~MEMOIR MONDAY| ALWAYS WITH A BOOK~ On the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevadas, a tiny town known as Swall Meadows resides. A bit farther south, a larger (but still small) town of Bishop lies cradled in the hands of Owens Valley California. This is the primary setting of MIRACLE COUNTRY (Algonquin Books, July 14) by debut author Kendra Atleework. I was initially drawn to MIRACLE COUNTRY because I have a ‘thing’ with land and geography, how it shapes one’s worldview, art, and essence.Having recently visited a high desert myself, I was intrigued and enthralled with this grittier, rustic side of life–from raging wildfires to blizzards and gale-force winds, this area witnesses it all. MIRACLE COUNTRY blends autobiography with environmental writing along with history. Here, we learn about the origins of L.A. (Owens Valley being just a few hours away), and how the Los Angeles Aqueduct was developed to usher water to the sprawling metropolis, rich with …

Small towns, changing seasons, finding oneself, going back yet moving forward–Susan Bernhard discovers this & more in her debut WINTER LOON

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By Leslie Lindsay  A coming-of-age tale of one young man’s family tragedy about resilience, family secrets, dysfunction, and forging a new path.  WINTER LOON is a beautiful as it is stark. Debut novelist Susan Bernhard turns a graceful hand to an emotionally harrowing and highly dysfunctional family using the weather and the natural world as a backdrop. Through the retrospective lens of Wes Ballot, we follow along as his childhood comes to a dreadful end when his mother is drowned in an icy Minnesota lake. Wes is left with his drifter father, who, for the moment isn’t really around. At 15, Wes can’t be left alone in the family’s abandoned cabin in the woods, and so he is shipped off to live with his maternal grandparents in Montana, who aren’t too thrilled he’s there. Grandparents Ruby and Gip have remained embittered and cold to one another–and the world–what’s worse, Wes is forced to live in his mother’s old bedroom, still decorated as if she were 15 and living at home. But she’s dead and Wes misses his …

Does our environment shape us? Mindy Mejia is here chatting about the pull of setting and how it can shape or destroy, loss, reinvention & more in LEAVE NO TRACE

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By Leslie Lindsay The mysterious disappearance of a father and his 9-year-old son into the Minnesota wilderness and then the return of that son a decade later on grief, abandonment, family, and more. Mindy Mejia is here chatting about her newest book, LEAVE NO TRACE (Emily Bestler Books/Simon & Schuster, October 2018). Mindy Mejia’s 2017 domestic thriller, EVERYTHING YOU WANT ME TO BE introduced gritty small-town secrets and the precarious Hattie Hoffman, sending readers in search of ambition, obsession, and the elusive one-day read. She’s back with another compelling thriller, this time set in the wilderness of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Maya Stark is 23-years old and beginning her career as a speech pathologist at Congdon Psychiatric Facility. Her boss/mentor, Dr. Mehta suggests Maya work with the young ‘back-from-the-dead’ Lucas Blackthorn, who, after ten years of missing (presumed dead) in the wild of Minnesota is back, largely non-verbal and fighting demons. Maya isn’t sure. She’s young and relatively inexperienced. Yet Maya has secrets, too. Her mother abandoned she and her father years ago and she’s had …

WeekEND Reading: What if a dream propelled your story into action? That’s just what happened with Gian Sardar’s luminous debut, YOU WERE HERE, plus past lives, a mystery, Minnesota, & more about this story of the unseen.

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By Leslie Lindsay  Debut novelist Gian Sardar takes us on a journey through the murky world of dreams where the past weaves with the present in a chilling crime, told in a gorgeous lyrical prose. I have such a fascination with dreams–nightmares, too–and wonder just what they reveal about our conscious selves, and most of all–our past. That’s what YOU WERE HERE seeks to do; it pulls us into that dream world and reads almost as if you *are* in a dream, but not quite. Abby Walters is originally from Minnesota but living in L.A. with her screenwriting boyfriend who’s a bit (okay, a lot) commitment shy. She works at an estate jewelry shop appraising and selling antique baubles, yet no ring for her. Like all good stories, we get called away from the known and thrust into the world of the ‘unknown.’ So when Abby starts having those old dreams, the ones she only had in Minnesota, she is called back home to attempt to uncover their meaning. Unbeknownst to her, there are a grisly slew of rapes …

Writers on Wednesday: The challenge in developing empathy and rendering complex characters, the allure & mystery of lake water, a 1930s Minnesota cabin, decades-old mystery, and so much more in Heather Young’s THE LOST GIRLS

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By Leslie Lindsay It was the lake house in Minnesota that drew me to THE LOST GIRLS (William Morrow/Harper Collins, July 2016), the spellbinding debut from highly talented debut novelist Heather Young. Having lived in Minnesota briefly as a newlywed and then new mother, I eagerly dove into a narrative about the place I called home, about a place that shaped my early adulthood. In that sense, THE LOST GIRLS was wonderfully atmospheric, I felt the strong to-your-bones frigid winds whipping at my face, saw the thick, opaque ice forming over the lake, and felt the goose flesh on my arms as I imagined the faulty seals on the windows in that lake cottage. In the summer of 1935, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys her mother, who spends the rest of her life at the lake house, hoping in vain that her favorite daughter will walk out of the woods. Sixty years later, Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the …

Write On, Wednesday: Author Wendy Webb Shares Insights on First Lines, Metaphorical Ghosts, and More

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By Leslie Lindsay I am pleased as punch to welcome bestselling Minnesota author Wendy Webb to our literary community today. Ms. Webb pens novels of gothic suspense set in mystical locales where buried family secrets bubble to the surface, seamlessly weaving the past with the present. L.L.: Wendy, thank you for being with us today. I just completed THE TALE OF HALCYON CRANE, your debut into fiction and loved it. The beginning of the book completely tugged at me, urging me to read more. In fact one of the first few lines reads like this, “I was called to a tiny island in the middle of the Great Lakes by a dead woman.” What, in your opinion is so important about the first page of a novel? W.W.: For me, the first page of a novel, even the first paragraphs, are crucial. When I’m in a bookstore browsing, especially when I’m looking at books by an author whose work I’m unfamiliar with, I usually know within the first pages whether I’m going to like it …