It's been a while since I've had a post blow up this much (I think the closest I ever got on this blog was my Ask A Manager Thanksgiving) and I'm doing my best to keep up with the tags and the notes because it does mean so much to see you all enjoying it, the locals adding their own items and the folks from elsewhere saying they've fallen in love with our cities from afar and they want to visit (though if you're not a journalist or faith leader, please wait until it is safe).
I know I don't live in a utopia--the racial disparities are stark, the housing prices are ever rising, when you go on a walk this time of year tiny icicles form on your eyelashes and if you blink too slowly your eyelids can briefly freeze together--but there can be so much beauty here, and so much joy, and I wrote the post because I wanted to remind us all of what we're fighting for.
It's been particularly meaningful to me when folks have said it has really evoked a sense of place, because that's such a big part of what I try to do as a writer. The Twin Cities is where I've lived for over a decade now, rounding the corner to two, and so it's often a setting of convenience called upon in a story for a street intersection here, a corner store there. But if you're interested in a bit more of Twin Cities Gothic, here are a few of my stories where the setting is more front and center:
The Wendigo At the End of the Blue Line
This Is the Poem Fragment the Archaeologists Will Find When They Are Excavating University Avenue
Reconstructing the Goldenrod Conspiracy, Edina Room, Saturday 2:30-3:30
Children of Air (the others are free, but this one is $3.99 for an ebook or $5 for a zine)
Now, I was hit with a double whammy of being raised in Japan and the Midwestern United States, so obviously I cannot share my own work without also sharing the work of other more talented local artists with an amazing sense of place about the Twin Cities that shows up in their works. Here is a (woefully incomplete, I will definitely sit bolt upright at midnight thinking of someone I should have included) list:
Saymoukda Vongsay, a.k.a. Refugenius, has a play "Dead Cops in Little Mekong" at the Playwrights' Center tomorrow! (I definitely recommend getting on the Playwrights' Center mailing list even if you're outside of MN, because you can still get access to livestreams of so many of their plays later.)
The Stars and the Blackness Between Them, a coming of stage and romance story of two sixteen year old Black girls in Minneapolis, by poet laureate Junauda Petrus
Sarajea makes zines on a variety of topics from rating pickle products to dealing with panic attacks, but the Twin Cities, and especially their community at George Floyd Square, is a strong recurring theme
Amy Salloway tells nonfiction stories about her life, and I have never met anyone else who has such of a deep understanding of story structure
If you've read any contemporary Native American literature, you've probably read Louise Erdrich, but that's no reason not to mention a classic! She has a bookstore, Birchbark Books
