Month: April 2007

  • Second Chance for Third Second

    Twin Cities native Tommy Nehls was talking on the phone from Ft. Lauderdale, where he has been living since 1986. Nehls sounded alternately incredulous and bemused that an obscure record he made with a bunch of high school pals had become a hot (and pricey) commodity among a small but international community of vinyl fetishists…

  • Free Verse series: Kevin Young

    Young, a poet and contributor to the catalog for the ongoing Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love exhibition, is appearing as part of the Rain Taxi/Walker Art Center Free Verse series. You hear too much nonsense about poets whose work is steeped in jazz or the blues, but Young’s work is…

  • Cat Scratch Fever

    About a year ago, on an April afternoon, Al Wolter drove to his neighbor’s house in Sandstone to help with a controlled burn. The neighbor, Cynthia Gamble, a wild-animal trainer, was his best female friend and the two regularly shared cocktails and sang karaoke together on his home machine. “She had an earthy sense of…

  • Heather McElhatton’s Playlist

    Child of the ’80s that she is, when local writer and independent public-radio producer Heather McElhatton decided to write a book, she chose to resurrect the literary model made famous by Bantom Books’ classic Choose Your Own Adventure series. The result, Pretty Little Mistakes, is a novel with 150 endings to choose from, where adults…

  • Plains Tasty

    It’s dusk, and there’s an unmistakable whiff of charcoal in the air. It’s the sign of the outdoor cooking season, and is as eagerly awaited as the return of the red-winged blackbirds to the tree by my driveway. I look at my own shining, gray monster on the deck and I start thinking of the…

  • Epistle Packin’

    “Mom and I are standing in front of the Church on Spilled Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia,” wrote Ann Bernstein of Minneapolis. “The church was built on the very spot where Emperor Alexander II was assassinated on March 1, 1881. The Literary issue was a perfect travel companion in this country, where things seem familiar…