Silent Creek by Tony Wirt

tonywirt.com

Recommendations

Minneapolis St. Paul Magazine August issue, Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl’s profile of William Kent Krueger is not online, but available in the print magazine

Thanks for listening! Subscribe at readminnesotabooks.com or on your favorite podcast app

“Happy people are wonderful in real life but they don’t really do much in novels. They don’t move the plot along.” —Andrea Uptmor

The New People by Andrea Uptmor (Little, Brown and Company, 2026)

@andreauptmor on Instagram

Recommendations

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

Gentrifier: A Memoir by Anne Elizabeth Moore

Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived In That House by Meghan Daum

Thanks for listening to Read Minnesota Books!

Summer’s almost over, which means Season 2 of Read Minnesota Books is almost ready to launch into your favorite podcast app! I’m excited to share new recommendations and conversations with authors of thrillers, domestic fiction, picture books, memoir, anthologies, novellas, and poetry.

But first, I have a couple of requests from you. Please fill out the following quick and fun poll. I want to learn more about your listening, reading, and Minnesota preferences.

Book giveaway

I am in desperate need of more Apple Podcast ratings and reviews! Why?

• An author actually turned my interview request down because I didn’t have a brag-worthy number of downloads-per-episode!

• More Apple Podcast reviews make this look like a legitimate enterprise, so potential listeners will listen and subscribe.

• Bigger download numbers means less rejection for me. If you rate the podcast ***** or leave a review, you’re helping my mental health because rejection hurts!

If you want to help the podcast and receive a FREE BOOK, here’s what to do:

Leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It can take between 24 hours and 1 week for the review to show up. When your review is visible, let me know. Send me a screenshot or just a note with your Apple Podcasts username so I can verify you actually left a review.

Don’t know what to write? My internet review game is weak, too. Here are some suggestions:

Then, choose which you love more: free books or book gossip. In exchange for a review:

• I’ll send you a free Minnesota book, snail mail! OR

• I’ll tell you which Minnesota author turned me down

Honestly, I’m both a generous and a petty person (no one thing defines me!) so I’ll probably grant you both.

Thank you!

Thank you, thank you! It’s great to learn more about you and your reading and listening preferences. If you have more to share about Read Minnesota Books, please comment on this post or send me a direct message.

I hope you are having a decent summer. Here in Minneapolis we had a lovely and mild June, perfect for bike rides, picnics, outdoor concerts, and ice cream cones at the Lake Harriet Bandshell. Then in July the air turned wildfire sooty, heat dome hot, and spongy humid. My father-in-law died. The Boundary Waters burned. My kids’ Youtube streams filled up with primary election attack ads. It wasn’t great. August has been better. My family took an epic road trip out West and I read a bunch of books, including some forthcoming novels from Minnesota writers I’m really excited to interview. I know that a lot of the country is back to school already, but here in Minneapolis, the State Fair’s barnyard births and deep-fried curds and all-you-can-drink udder juice rule our city’s school calendar, so we still have three solid weeks until the first bell rings.

I’m planning a fantastic season 2 of the Read Minnesota Books podcast. Besides reading, I’ve been preparing by listening again to the first season. My number one change? I’m dumping the favorite Minnesota writer question because making authors pick their fave isn’t fair. There are too many to choose from, and authors who live here have too many friends to offend by omission. I’m thinking about asking, instead, “What’s the last Minnesota book you’ve read?” But I’m open to suggestions. If you have another Minnesota book question that’s better than that, comment below or send me a direct message.

I started the podcast as a service to readers, to offer an expansive view of what qualifies as a Minnesota book and to recommend new things to read. But in my re-listening, I realized that I’ve also been collecting writing advice. Below, I’ve compiled some of the best writing lessons from the first twenty episodes of Read Minnesota Books.

To write, read widely

You can’t be a writer without first being a reader. Read widely, and outside of the genre in which you write. When I asked my first poet guest, Mark Nowak, “Who’s your favorite Minnesota writer?” I expected him to name another poet. Instead, he introduced me to Meridel LeSeuer, a novelist and essayist who wrote in a completely different style from him, but with some of the same themes about labor and dignity and fairness.

Reading work that’s different from yours can also help you find effective and surprising structures. Duluth musician and memoirist Gaelynn Lea talked about reading memoirs when she was working on her own. She was smart and didn’t stick to music memoirs. Instead, she found the right structure for her book through analyzing the format of Russian spy Alexei Navalnei’s autobiography. Navalnei began his memoir with his poisoning, the thing everyone knows about him, which inspired Lea to begin her memoir with winning the NPR Tiny Desk Concert, her most well-known achievement.

The pen (or pencil) is stronger than the blank page

How do you feel about an empty document? Is your first sentence the hardest? If the blank screen stumps you, try writing by hand. Jill Swenson doesn’t start on a computer. Instead, she begins by “opening my blank composition book and pulling out my sharp pencil.” She told me that she writes by hand because, “For me, that’s much more efficient. I’m getting raw stuff down on the page. There’s nothing more exciting than that fresh take, dropping into a scene from a memory that you nearly forgot, or figuring out a plot point.”

Swenson also keeps a notepad on the passenger seat of her car for scribbling down ideas when inspiration strikes. Minneapolis poet Anthony Ceballos does the same, but with ink. He begins with an open notebook, “a couple of good pens, and just sitting.”

Forcing yourself to begin a new project can also help get you out of an emotional funk. For novelist Katherine Packert Burke, beginning All Us Saints while promoting her first novel helped her to deal with a grueling book tour and debut author anxiety.

Starting a brand new draft might just become your new, most enjoyable part of the writing process, what Kao Kalia Yang describes as, “That first spark of inspiration, the thing that puts me to the page, when the stories are there and I feel them and I can connect with the emotional truth of that first experience, writing it out, that is my favorite.”

I wonder if writers like Yang, who love to write first drafts, enjoy generating because the initial work they produce is close to done. For the rest of us? We have to get words down on the page, even if they’re bad. Andrew Elfenbein, by way of advice from his University of Minnesota colleague Julie Schumacher, says that the key to drafting a novel is filling sixty pages without worrying about the quality of the writing. Sixty pages gives you a skeleton of a plot. Elfenbein said, “I could feel comfortable knowing that it was okay if my draft wasn’t 300 pages. It was fine if it was more of a seed than a complete draft, but it was useful to have a beginning, a middle, and ending.” Once you have the start of something—some craft advice crudely calls it a vomit or garbage draft—then you can clean it up.

True story: I once submitted a first draft to a writing instructor that was so bad, so upchucky, so dirty overflowing dumpster-worthy, that she called me to ask if I was okay. She thought I had had a stroke! LOL?

For children’s author Margi Preus, first drafts feels like work, but she gets them done because she knows that once she has something to work with, the fun begins. There’s really no shortcut around writing a first (probably bad!) draft. You have to get it down on the page. Angela Pelster, author of The Evolution of Fire, and director of the creative writing program at Hamline University, teaches writing students and undergraduates in different programs of study. She says the best way to become a better writer is “just to write and write and read and read and write and read. And then you’re going to figure it out.”

Revise relentlessly

Revision isn’t fun for everyone. Whether they like revising or not, every writer I’ve interviewed on Read Minnesota Books acknowledges that good writing requires multiple drafts. As Swenson said, “I know, as an editor, good writing becomes really good through rewriting and revision and editing.”

Children’s author Mary Casanova also spoke about this crucial part of the writing process, saying, “You can transform your writing if you revise enough.” For novelist Stacy Carlson, revision lets her “consider the elements of craft that I want to utilize, develop the themes and the story—that all happens more fully in revision.”

Revision lets you experiment and try different techniques. If your draft is dragging, play with the perspective. Tell the story from a different angle. Switch tenses. Carlson spoke about how present tense can “close the distance between the reader and the heart of the book.” Or, play with point of view. When Swenson writes historical scenes, she said, “I sometimes change point of view. I will go into first person and write it from one character’s point of view. It helps me understand what’s happening in that scene, in that historical moment. Switching those perspectives helps me reconstruct the scene.”

Elfenbein, with his sixty page draft, said that revision lets him notice opportunities for humor and “connections between earlier and later parts of the book that may not have been visible to me when I was drafting.”

After all of that experimentation, how do you know when you’re done? For Schumacher, when she spoke with me about her short story collection Patient, Female, she acknowledged the difficulty of knowing when to end a story. She said, “Honestly, writing is terribly hard. It never gets easier. But that’s why it’s interesting--because you can work and work on something and think, ‘Am I done? What does done even mean? Because there is no such thing as perfection.” As you revise your draft, Schumacher suggests that arriving at the most specific description possible is the way to complete each detail in a story. “You can’t get to any sense of the universal except through the specific,” is her advice to fiction MFA students.

Cultivate your community

I heard from many writers that community was key to their success and mental health. Christopher Johnston, author of the novel Where You Come From Is Gone, found his writing cohort in a year-long class at The Loft Literary Center. Mary Casanova and her writing group have been meeting for thirty years. For children’s author Margi Preus, her family is a part of her writing community. Her adult children even helped name the playful character in her Shrew Detective series!

Can your heroes be part of your community? For sure. Take memoirist Courtney Kocak: she was very influenced by Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild. Kocak wrote Strayed an email of thanks and even included Strayed in the Acknowledgement section of Girl Gone Wild. “I don’t ever anticipate receiving a response,” Kocak said. “She already gave me enough. She doesn’t need to give me anything else.”

If you’re a classic introvert type of writer, maybe your community is right here! Podcasts can form a satisfying, asynchronous type of writing community.

Don’t quit, submit!

Be patient. Publishing can be excruciatingly slow. Keep in mind these inspiring words from author and Minneapolis College writing professor Shannon Gibney: “Your superpower, as a writer, is the ability to think and write your way to the emotional truth of a situation.” Writing takes time. According to Gibney, you sometimes have to put things away for a while until you have more insight.

“What every writer wants is somebody to read their stuff,” Rashad Shabazz told me. When he wrote Prince’s Minneapolis, he worked extra hard, as someone comfortable with a naturally academic voice, to make the writing accessible for a general audience. He took care to make sure his book reached the right people.

Keep working on your essays, articles, and stories. Keep those submissions circulating. Mary Casanova, who has published scores of books, accumulated over two hundred rejections before her first publication.

What’s the best thing to do when you’re waiting on your submissions, queries, or pitches? Start a new project. Got the empty doc blues? Scroll back up to the top of this advice article and review how to approach the blank page.

Sea Salt Eatery: Recipes to Enjoy Year-Round

August 6, Cooking demonstration at Cooks of Crocus Hill

August 8, 2pm, Brookies Meet and Greet

@seasalteatery and @gail.rosenblum on Facebook

@seasalt and @gail.rosenblum on Instagram

gailrosenblum.com

Recommendations

Read Deborah’s Racket review: Sea Salt Eatery’s Cookbook Dishes Out Recipes With a Side of History

Listen to RacketCast, Ep. 56: BookCast Vol. 2 Feat. Writer/Podcaster Deborah Copperud

Support local media

New Scenic Cafe Cookbook

The Ultimate Minnesota Cookie Book

Thanks for listening to Read Minnesota Books!

Novels

The Lake Club by Lina Patton

Lina Patton based her buzzy new novel The Lake Club, in part, on her experience working a service job on Lake Minnetonka, so I know it’s going to contain an enjoyable amount of upstairs-downstairs intrigue and Midwestern passive aggressive dialogue. As someone who doesn’t own lake property, who has publicly declared my disdain for cabin culture, and will never pay for a membership to a place more exclusive than Costco, I am so excited for this book. I’m saving my copy to read on a Lake Superior beach on an upcoming (anti-elitist) long weekend camping trip.

Ada by Mark Haber

Out next week from Coffee House Press, Ada by Mark Haber promises absurd hilarity in this first-person narrative about a petty tyrant in a fictional European country, written in Haber’s signature style.

Short Fiction

Again, Harder by Alice Stoehr

This recommendation is from , who I interviewed about All Us Saints back in May. Again, Harder is a collection of Alice Stoehr’s short fiction about a community of trans women living in a Midwestern town, published by Feminist Press this spring. If you enjoyed Stag Dance by Torey Peters, Again, Harder should be the next book you read.

July Sun by Aamina Ahmad

In this new collection by University of Minnesota creative writing professor, playwright, and award-winning author Aamina Ahmad, the short stories take place in Pakistan. Described as “searing” and “atmospheric,” some of the stories in this collection were previously published in prestigious literary journals like The Missouri Review, One Story, and Ecotone.

The Extra and The Other by Annie Neugebauer

Here’s the creepy premise of The Extra, Book One in horror author Annie Neugebauer’s The Outsiders Sequence series:

Ten people head out on a backpacking trip, but the first night eleven set up camp. Everyone remembers everyone else. Who is the extra?

And Book Two, The Other, is ready when you’ve recovered from The Extra!

These are books I have to read in broad daylight! But if you’re braver than me, they’d be perfect for spooking yourself on a dark, stormy night, or for reading aloud around a campfire.

And if you want even more scary stuff, read Neugebauer’s debut short story collection You Have to Let Them Bleed published by Bad Hand Books earlier this year.

Local History

Minnesota’s Phoenix: From the Ashes of Braniff to Sun Country Airlines by Karyn Fernandes, Jennifer Kimball Gasperini, and Maggie Hill

With the recent Allegiant Air purchase of Sun Country and with summer travel at its peak, now is a great time to read up on local aviation history and the scrappy, homegrown origins of MSP’s biggest budget airline.

STRIKE! Twenty Days in 1970 When Minneapolis Teachers Broke the Law by William D. Green

An illegal teacher’s strike! I first read about this fascinating episode in Minnesota labor history when Racket published an excerpt from Green’s latest, recently published by University of Minnesota Press. Of interest to anyone who follows the neverending story of Minneapolis Public School’s budget crisis. (And for extra credit, listen to my episode with Shannon Gibney, Minneapolis author and School Board candidate.)

Pop culture

What Would Ken Do? by Kara Nesvig

I’ve been enjoying writer ’s newsletter Oh I Love That so I was delighted to come across her fun romp into Barbie culture, What Would Ken Do?, on a shelf promoting local authors at Acorn Bookshop in St. Paul. Read this if you’re nostalgic for simpler times, like the summer of 2023.

Minute 12 of this episode contains a frank description of stillbirth. Please take care while listening.

Where Is My Sister?

What God Is Honored Here? Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by and for Native Women and Women of Color, Edited by Shannon Gibney and Kao Kalia Yang

@shannongibney on Bluesky

shannongibney.com

Shannon Gibney for District 3 Minneapolis School Board

2024 Racket interview about Gibney’s picture book We Miss You George Floyd

Recommendation

Make a plan to vote!

Subscribe to Read Minnesota Books and look forward to Season 2 in the fall!

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The Shrew Detective

Margipreus.com

@margipreus on Instagram

@margipreus on Facebook

Margi Preus’s The Devil Wears Prada 2 connection

Recommendations

Adolf Born

Glassful of Prayer by Anthony Ceballos (Trio House Press)

@thatcasualgayvampire on Instagram

Anthony Ceballos on Facebook

Recommendation

Wild Things by Lynette Reini-Grandell

Authors! You NEED to follow Jill on Substack and learn from her approach to book promotion - she is a masterclass in indie book publicity.

The Land of Everlasting Sky (She Writes Press)

Book tour

Jill D. Swenson on Substack

Jill D. Swenson on Facebook

Recommendation

It’s summer! Go to your public library!

Patient, Female (Milkweed Editions)

Julie Schumacher on Facebook

Recommendations

Refuse to be Done by Matt Bell

Matt Bell’s weasel word exercise

All Us Saints (Bloombury)

@katpburke on Twitter

Ghost Image, Katherine’s Substack newsletter

Recommendation

Help the show! Leave a review if you use Apple Podcasts or an app like Spotify or Castbox. The show has nine ***** ratings on Apple Podcasts and I would love ten or more!

Forward this email or share this post with a friend who loves to read, in Minnesota or elsewhere.

The Gyre (Alternating Current Press)

stacycarlson.com

Stacy Carlson on Facebook

@magnificentsparrow on Instagram

Recommendations

Girl Gone Wild Book Tour at Acorn Bookshop

Rain Taxi Twin Cities Literary Calendar

My favorite part of the book (and this interview) was learning about how compulsory music education in Minneapolis from 1911 to the mid-1950s create a community with incredible levels of music literacy, creating just the right conditions to cultivate a musical genius like Prince.

Do you have a Prince fan in your life? Please share this episode with them. They’ll love it!

Recommendation

Our discussion ran long, so you won’t hear a recommendation at the end of the episode. But if you want more Prince and more geography of music, I recommend listening to this Minnesota Public Radio story about the writer Frank Bures’s walking Prince tour.

[Fun fact: Frank Bures, Minnesota rapper Yung Gravy, and I are all staff alum of YMCA Camp Olson.]

Links

Prince’s Minneapolis: A Biography of Sound and Place (University of North Carolina Press)

Paisley Park

“ICE Can’t Silence Prince’s Minneapolis” by Rashad Shabazz, Zocalo Public Square

@drshabazzz.bsky.social

@drshabazz on Instagram

Adore

Mark has a book release event at Moon Palace Books, Tuesday, May 12, at 7:00pm.

Thanks for listening to Read Minnesota Books!

Thanks for listening to Read Minnesota Books!

Northwoods Lullaby from University of Minnesota Press

marycasanova.com

Northwoods Young Writers: A Teen Writing Retreat

2026 Author + Illustrator events for Northwoods Lullaby

Duluth: May 2, 11am Zenith Bookstore and 3pm at Fitgers Bookstore

Minneapolis: May 9th, 10:00am at Strib Unbound, Theodore Wirth Park

St. Paul: May 23, 10:30am, Red Balloon bookstore

Roseville: June 9, 6:30pm, Roseville Nature Center / Picture Book Salon

Ely: July 3, 10:30am, Piragis Bookstore

Recommendation

Make your northwoods camping reservations now!

Thanks for listening to Read Minnesota Books

Catch Gaelynn’s Book Launch & Concert on Thursday, April 30, at Open Eye Theater in Minneapolis!

If you’re enjoying Read Minnesota Books, please give us a 5-star rating and quick review on your podcast app.

The book launch for The Evolution of Fire takes place next week, Thursday, April 16, at The Hive Collaborative in St. Paul and it looks super fun, with music, a film, poetry, reading, and a book discussion.

Thanks for listening to Read Minnesota Books!