In Not Good Enough Girl, amidst the control, confusion, and chaos caused by her eight-times-married mother, Sondra Brooks’ story spans the extreme emotions of a mother-daughter relationship, touching on cyclical family dysfunction, addiction, and forgiveness. Beginning at the age of five, Sondra spends decades auditioning for the role of her authentic self. Her dazzling mother casts her as confidante and co-conspirator in her affairs and serial marriages. Sondra vacillates between fierce anger toward her mother—who does nothing to protect her from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse—and a desperate need for her love and approval. As an adult, Sondra enters into and stays in a toxic marriage for years, engaging in affairs with married men rather than divorcing. When therapy and AA eventually propel her out of the sense-deadening haze of alcohol and cigarettes, she summons the courage to tell her husband she plans to leave him. He reacts by playing on her biggest fear, telling her, “You’re going to turn out just like your mother.” Sondra attempts to establish a sober and separate identity, but tensions between her and her mother further increase when she marries someone new—a man who displaces her mother as the epicenter of her life—and her mother’s seventh marriage ends. During this time, traumatic childhood memories suddenly surface and a seismic shift occurs, freeing Sondra from her need for maternal connection. But establishing a life independent from her mother proves far more complicated than she could have imagined. Sondra R. Brooks graduated from Interlochen Arts Academy…

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…

Contemporary poetry strays from traditional ideas of a poem: rigid structure, definitive rhyme scheme, commonly about nature or love. Poetry exemplifies and dissects certain internal states, tracing racial, political, and gendered themes of universality and solitude. At my university, I’m currently enrolled in a class dedicated to Contemporary American Poetry where we discuss the complexities of this genre. I’ve found studying poetry makes me a better writer. This comes from the emphasis on dissecting details, utilizing a larger context as reference, and reconciling metaphors with the reality which poetry embodies. Details: I understand poetry is not for everyone. It’s confusing, sometimes upsetting, and not everyone connects to it. Like any other form of writing, the participation of the reader is as important as the author’s. Poets and readers alike must make an effort to be conscious of the connections between words and their referents in reality. This sense of awareness also yields a better comprehension of the details in poetry. The most compelling part of poetry, in my experience, is the deep attention to detail. For example, Claudia Rankine uses her profound awareness of micro-aggressions to detail one moment’s “intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating seconds.” Rankine develops in her poem these daily occurrences of oppression to turn the mundane into the profane. With every poem I read I am more astounded by the level of concentration to the details which she describes with such fervor. Noticing them in written works creates a distinctive awareness of including them…