One of the perks of pushing books is getting to meet the authors who write them. Letting what's on our minds come out of our mouths is like the icing on the cake.

This Month...

Louis Jenkins, author of Before You Know It and Nice Fish

CGB: As I was reading European Shoes, it occurred to me that interspersing poetry with notebook entries, as a form, felt suddenly brand new.

LJ: Well, I got the idea when I was in Wales. I’d been, you know, writing things, taking notes, and working on poems all the time. I talked with a class, and they had been working with a form called Haibun, which if you know the Japanese poet Basho… he did a book called something like… they translated it as, The Narrow Road to the North, or something like that, and that’s the form. He goes and he has a little travel entry, and then he writes a little haiku poem. So I thought, ‘Well, I could use that, and just write prose poems instead of Haiku.’ And so that’s kind of how I put the book together.

It’s an exciting form, in part because we seem to do less writing in notebooks, in the age of social media. Have you worked through other forms?

No. Garrison wanted me to hook all of these poems together and turn them into a novel. But I tried that and it didn’t work out very well.

If you were assigned to write a Minnesotan version of your poem, “The Full English Breakfast,” with a list of Minnesotan fare, what would that poem be?

I don’t know. Of course, everybody would immediately write about Lutefisk. I think I’d have to think about something else. And, of course, there’s the proverbial hot-dish, church basement fare. But I don’t know. If I were gonna write about food of Minnesota, I’d have to think about that awhile. Because, you know, you could do those kinds of things, but they’ve been done and been done well. I’d have to think of something new. And at the moment, I have no idea.

If you did the hot-dish, I could see that getting pretty wordy, too. What with all of the preheating…

I discovered that the traditional green bean casserole… you know that?

Yea, with the stuff on top? 

Yea, the canned, fried onion rings. I discovered, by looking on the web… I thought, ‘Well, there must be an alternative, better recipe’…Very difficult to find. Almost every one of them called for Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup and canned green beans.

There's not something more up-to-date?

I found one or two, and I even tried one, but frankly, I didn’t think it was as good as the old one.

So, Campbell’s has a monopoly on the green bean casserole, unfortunately.

I guess so.

I haven’t lived in Minnesota long, but as a boy, during visits to Duluth, I and everybody else was captivated by the raising of the lift bridge. And as soon as it began to rise, everybody came to the shore there to start looking out for ships. Is that how it is in Duluth? Are people in awe of it still? Still taking time to watch the ships?

Well, in the summer you get a lot of tourists, and, of course, it's all new to them. For people who live on Park Point it can sometimes be an annoyance. You get trapped. You're supposed to be at work or the dentist or something. So, it sort of behooves you to know the schedule.

Previously...

Theresa Weir, author of The Orchard.

CGB: Many writers write in coffee shops or studios. You, however, bought a church. Does that "I shouldn't be doing this" feeling that people often claim to feel when it comes to using the lord's name in vain or sneaking boos inside a sanctuary ever occur to you while you write? Even a sentence as harmless as "He lit a cigarette and tossed the pack on the dashboard." Does a part of you think, "Eh, I'll change it to candle"?

TW: It's really more about what the neighbors think.  One night I looked outside to see an angry mob of torch-carrying villagers  trudging up the hill to the church. I thought they were saying, "Kill the witch." They were actually saying, "This hill's a bitch."   So it's easy to misconstrue how people react to living in what was once a sacred space. I think everybody's okay with it.

You divide your time between St. Paul and rural Wisconsin. Everyone assumes the worst, so what's the easiest thing about living, occasionally, in the middle of nowhere?

My middle name is Toiling In Obscurity, and I'd really hate to have to change it to I Think I've Heard Of You.   So I wouldn't admit to having read or written the book.

So, you're a genre-spanning author, who lives in two places at once and writes under the pseudonym Anne Frasier. Do you have a favorite anything?

My favorite thing is getting behind someone who's driving very slowly in the left lane. I love that. -December, 2011

Lynne Cox, author Swimming to Antarctica and South With The Sun

CGB: In reference to swimming across the English Channel, you mentioned never wanting to do the same thing over and over again. How do you feel about stop-and-go traffic?

LC: That's why I live in California, so I can drive on the freeways.

It took you 7 years to write South With the Sun, and 21 to write Swimming to Antarctica, which you began writing on a typewriter and finished on computer. Do you prefer one over the other?

Each book has its own method. The way I wrote Swimming to Antarctica was chronological, but then Grayson was just sitting down to write this "One day..." story, and then [South With The Sun] was me weaving stories through time and place and theme, which was so different than what I'd done before. So, your question was... what?

Well, your answer is more interesting than my question. But some writers have strong opinions about, for example, writing on a laptop as opposed to a pad of paper.

What I learned is that I'll start by writing longhand. When I know that I'm ready to do it, I'll start writing, and the first two or three or four paragraphs will be constant writing, and then I'll sit down and start writing it on the computer, because I don't think writing longhand anymore is good for me. Now, I can just go from brain to computer.

You spoke of invoking a "presence of mind," while swimming alone in the dark at 1 in the morning or above a baby whale. Does that presence of mind necessary for enduring such mentally and physically demanding states and situations serve a purpose in the process of writing a book?

Absolutely. That's such a great parallel, because you have to maintain the storyline, you have to keep going in a forward direction, because if you don't, you lose yourself and you lose the story. And there's nothing worse than to be in the middle of... "I finally figured out what I need to write here," and then somebody calls you. Because you know that that whole thing you've figured out in your brain now that you're just about ready to write... you're thinking as you're going along, and now that thought is gone, and it just drives me nuts.

So you value preparation and endurance when it comes to thinking?

Exactly, and seeing a thought all the way through. That's why I don't write poetry. I'm a long writer. I write books. But that whole sense of being right there in the moment as you're writing it, that's what I really try to do. That's why I love when people say, "When I read about your swim in Greenland, I felt like I was right there." That's the best that I could ever hope to write: that I could take somebody and make them feel like they're right there in that moment.

It sounds like you're saying there's an association between length and longevity and the ability to focus.

Yes. And I learned, like swimming short distances in very, very cold water, the intensity of that focus is probably what got me through it. And the long distance swimmer is like the long distance novel or nonfiction writer. It's a book, not a novella.

You seem to like the cold. Have you considered writing a book about or in Minnesota. Perhaps one titled, Living in Saint Paul?

I hadn't thought about that. But I keep hoping that one day I'll get to swim across Lake Wobegon. -November 2011

Peter Geye, author of Safe From The Sea

CGB: As former editor of Third Coast, you must have read a lot of cover letters. What's the oddest personal fact about an author you've ever come upon that had nothing to with their writing?

PG: I got a letter from a woman who said that she'd never heard of any of us, but that we should remember her name, because she was going to be famous. In fact, I was at Benjamin Percy's reading the other day, and a woman came up to him and said, "I've never read your books, and I'm not going to buy them, but you should remember my name." For all I know it was the same person.

Your novel takes place along the northern Minnesota lakeshore. What's your favorite thing about fall in Minnesota?

It means it's almost winter. I love the cold. It's 80 degrees in the middle of October. That's not right. It should be 55 right now, preparing us for highs of... 6.

It's coming up on Halloween. Say trick-or-treaters come to your door, but don't say "trick or treat". Instinctively, how would you react?

I'm pretty adamant about wanting to hear it. But we live in a neighborhood with the world's most polite children, so they not only say "trick or treat" but "thank you," "happy halloween," the whole thing. -October 2011