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…

Jill D. Swenson’s forthcoming  memoir, The Land of Everlasting Sky: A Memoir of Loss and Legacy on Lake of the Woods, will be released on June 2 from She Writes Press (distributed by Simon & Schuster). Early reviews have praised the book; D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer at Midwest Book Review calls it, “…a powerfully evocative discourse on race, culture, and personal empowerment which weaves together a seemingly disparate set of values and observations, creating a narrative powerfully impactful in its tone and approach to life.” And Kirkus Reviews writes, “Deeply moving and eye-opening, this memoir confronts the centuries of systemic bigotry that have led to Indigenous erasure.” Clear-eyed and yet deeply personal, The Land of Everlasting Sky is a compelling exploration of the history we inherit and our relationships to land and each other. You can pre-order your copy here. Q: You learned an Ojibwe family had been removed from their land to build a casino. How did that discovery lead to a book? A: After my mother’s funeral, I visited northern Minnesota where she grew up. My fondest memories of Mom were from my childhood vacations spent with her family in Warroad—picking wild blueberries, swimming in Lake of the Woods, seeing a moose, meeting an old Ojibwe man named Kakaygeesick in the nursing home. When I returned to Warroad in 2014 and discovered Kakaygeesick’s great-grandson, Don, and his elderly mother had been forcibly removed from their land by Red Lake Nation to build a new casino, I thought it…

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…