Guest blog by Naomi Yaeger, Duluth MN A book award ceremony can refresh and energize you while you plug away at a manuscript. For more than three years I’ve worked on a manuscript. I’m a newspaper journalist, but that doesn’t make writing a book any easier for me. I’m used to weekly deadlines and writing short stories. I’ve been in a funk lately. A couple weeks ago I treated myself to a massage. My massage therapist asked me if I were attending the book award ceremony happening an hour after my appointment. I left and pointed my car in the direction of the University of Minnesota-Duluth campus; the venue for the free event. The buzz of chattering friends filled a university ballroom as local authors and book aficionados gathered for the Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards and book fair. Adult beverages, appetizers, and the shared love of books added to the camaraderie of the event. Before the awards, author Michael Fedo spoke about the trials and tribulations of getting published, negative critiques, and meager earnings. Fedo is the author of nine books including The Lynchings in Duluth and The Zenith City: Stories from Duluth. The 150 people in the audience on May 26 waited with bated breath as the winners were announced. Forty-four books in six categories had been nominated. The categories were memoir, poetry, art and photography, fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. Winners received $200. Both winners and honorable mentions received glass plaques and NEMBA book seals. Established in 1998,…

Duluth-based journalist and creative writer Naomi Yaeger is counting down the weeks to the launch of Blooming Hollyhocks: Tales of Joy During Hard Times. This work of creative nonfiction is the author’s story of her mother, Janette Minehart, who grew up with four siblings in a small Minnesota prairie town during the Depression and came of age during WWII. Not yet available for pre-ordering, Blooming Hollyhocks will be published in October by Beaver Pond Press, an indie publisher in St. Paul, Minnesota. Naomi Yaeger will read an excerpt from her new book on Saturday, October 18, at 12:30 pm at the Nokomis Library at 5100 34th Avenue South in Minneapolis. On October 28 at 6:30 pm in Duluth, Naomi will take the stage at Wussow’s Concert Café with Minnesota author Linda LeGarde Grover to talk about storytelling, resilience, and the ties that bind communities together. They will be accompanied by Terry Larson, Naomi’s husband, who plays folk songs on banjo. Co-hosted by Zenith Bookstore and Wussow’s Concert Café, the event is open to the public. Food and refreshments may be purchased at the café. “Blooming Hollyhocks is a sweet, memory-bending reminiscence of one family’s journey from ‘the old days’ to World War II and the cusp of modernity. Set in The Dakotas and Minnesota, the author charts her family story with clear, uncluttered writing full of historical detail and useful geography besides. But her true goal is the inner workings of the family itself, and how, even in the hardest of times, joy is still possible.” – Will Weaver, author of Power & Light, and Sweetland: Collected Short…

Award-winning author Jeannine Ouellette will be in Duluth at the end of October for two literary events — live and in-person, both free and open to the public. On Wednesday, October 26, Jeannine Ouellette will read from her memoir, The Part That Burns, at 6 pm in the Kathryn A. Martin Library Rotunda on the campus of the University of Minnesota-Duluth. Ouellette will share the stage with Tim Moder, an Indigenous poet from northern Wisconsin. The event is sponsored by the Department of English, Linguistic and Writing Studies at UM-D, and it is free and open to the public. On Friday, October 28, Jeannine Ouellette will sign books at Zenith Bookstore (318 N. Central Avenue, Duluth) from 11 am until 1 pm. Jeannine Ouellette is the author of The Part That Burns, a Kirkus Best 100 Indie Book of 2021. Originally from Duluth, Ouellette lives in Minneapolis where she runs Elephant Rock, writing classes and retreats, named after the Duluth landmark in Lincoln Park. She recently published an essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books which featured the old Duluth Zoo. She was married in 2005 at Brighton Beach, and when she became a mother, she made a regular habit of bringing her children to where she was born. “I wanted to share with them my love for the shockingly cold waters of Lake Superior. I wanted to teach them how to stand on rocks and tease the crashing waves, inevitably getting soaked in the process. I needed to…