Front Row Seat: Fall reading roundup
DULUTH — When your leaf-peeping hike is over and you've survived that haunted corn maze, fall is the perfect season to crack a book and enjoy the great indoors. Here are five recent titles of special interest to Northlanders.
This novel about a violinist reassessing her life was published at the end of 2023, but author Joann Cierniak wrote to me this year pointing out that the central character hails from Duluth. The young Holly studies with "Sister Gracia, a nun who taught at a Catholic college that stood at the top of a hill, with a view of Lake Superior in the distance." Eventually, the adult Holly brings a Bahamian beau back to Duluth, where he's introduced to sea smoke and the Cloquet Mill.
The book is suffused with a love of classical music, referencing composers as disparate as Giacomo Puccini and Philip Glass. In an email, Cierniak told me her readers include Duluth pianist Alexander Chernyshev and his wife, Olga Chernyshev, who plays violin in the Duluth Superior Symphony Orchestra. "They like to drive down London Road and look for the house where the Langer and Smith families might have lived," she wrote, referencing characters in the book (austinmacauley.com).
Mike Elliott does his writing at an Aitkin County cabin — until the temperature drops, when he relocates to a "winter hacienda in Arizona's Superstition Mountains." His debut novel, "Escaping Limbo," is set in the Twin Cities in the 1960s. It's a coming-of-age story about two boys who grapple with the events of a decade the author calls "the most chaotic and fascinating time in my lifetime."
The author compares the story to Stephen King's "The Body," the novel that was adapted into the movie "Stand By Me." Another point of reference could be John R. Powers' "The Last Catholic in America," with its account of growing up while grappling with the laws and lore of the Catholic Church. Gopher State references abound, and they'll particularly resonate if you're familiar with the Cities. Think Tony Oliva, the St. Paul Winter Carnival and Ye Old Mill. Even the Hamm's Beer jingle is cited: an earworm even for its listeners who were still far from drinking age (mikefelliott.com).
This picture book written by Sandra Hisakuni and illustrated by her daughter Sofia Hisakuni, published earlier this year by Beaver's Pond Press, is "a haiku journey" into the Boundary Waters. Dragonflies, beavers and moose are among the Hisakunis' muses for this book, in which each poem is accompanied by a prose reflection.
Sample verse: "Flicker, flicker, swoosh/ What a pity it would be/ If someone ate you." The writer whispers "a silent prayer of safety" for Boundary Waters fish, she admits in the following text. Other Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness visitors, one imagines, are simultaneously whispering quite the opposite.
In a note at the book's conclusion, the author explains that "my family's history spans oceans, combining Japanese and American cultures." After living in Japan, the Hisakunis moved to Minnesota and found that while they missed the former's natural beauty, they took new inspiration from time spent in the BWCAW and Quetico Provincial Park (beaverspondpress.com).
Greg Watson's poetry collection, a product of Duluth's Holy Cow! Press, just hit shelves last month. The St. Paul writer's Finnish heritage is central to these poems, which touch on the author's childhood and his experiences raising a young daughter. The first poem is about watching a storm with his child ("we are snug and secure in this boat of a bed"), with the second chronicling a Finnish funeral in Aitkin circa 1939 (the Finnish language, Watson writes, offers "many words to describe the existential weight of snow and ice, but lacks all future tense").
As specific as the poems are, they also touch on universal experiences — as well as those shared among all of us who call Minnesota home. One poem is titled "Why I Live in a Cold Climate." Among the reasons: "Because you can follow the tracks of those who have trudged through the snow before you, making a path for others yet to come" (holycowpress.org).
Marlene M. Johnson was Minnesota's first woman lieutenant governor, and her memoir "Rise to the Challenge" was published last month by the University of Minnesota Press. Her story has particular relevance in this election year, when Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan stands to be elevated to the state's top office if Gov. Tim Walz is elected to be vice president of the United States. For Northlanders, Johnson's story has another layer of significance: She served under Gov. Rudy Perpich, the only Minnesota governor to hail from the Iron Range.
Only about half the book concerns Johnson's years as lieutenant governor, with the remainder recounting her life since leaving office. The book is an important historical document that touches on initiatives like drives to increase tourism (the slogan "explore Minnesota" was made official under Perpich in the '80s) and to increase use of the state's bike trail system. "No previous Minnesota lieutenant governor had ever been charged with specific policy responsibilities," according to Johnson.
