Ann Treacy holds her family’s past close, and features this image in her house.Her grandmother, whose story figures into Treacy’s latest fiction, is pictured dressed in white. Enter a drawing to win a copy of The Search for the Homestead Treasure here.BY ANN TREACY The Search for the Homestead Treasure is a middle-grade novel about a … More Ann Treacy: Fiction is woven of fact, history, and hard work.
To be alive is to take risks every single second of every single day. —from Mary Casanova’s Ice-Out ——- The University of Minnesota Press is giving away advance copies of Ice-Out. Sign up for a chance to win here! Deadline for entry is June 30, 2016. ——-BEHIND THE FORTHCOMING BOOK ICE-OUTWITH MARY CASANOVA As with my earlier novel Frozen, the inspiration … More In 1920s Minnesota, Prohibition created moral dilemmas, violence—and opportunity.
BY MARY CASANOVA My grandparents were poor, yet they saved money all year long in a tin coffee can to celebrate Christmas with their ten grandkids in St. Paul. Every Christmas they arrived from the Iron Range in their blue station wagon loaded to the top with Christmas packages and baked goods. Of all the … More Recipe spectacular: Memories of Potica.
Page from Great Wolf and the Good Woodsmanby Betsy Bowen. ——- This is a continuation of a series running this week on authors’ favorite holiday recipes.See also: Bury your fish for better flavor and other questionable Norwegian advice, by Eric Dregni.——- BY BETSY BOWEN Ingredients:CarrotsPopcornCornSunflower seeds Instructions:* Cut carrots in chunks* String some of the … More Recipe spectacular: Feed the birds (and squirrels and mice, too) at midnight on Christmas Eve
Boat landing at Ranier in 1909. Photo from Koochiching County Historical Society. BY MARY CASANOVAAward-winning author and resident of Ranier, Minnesota For two decades I’ve been haunted by an account in Hiram Drache’s Koochiching, about life in northern Minnesota in the early 1900s. A prostitute was found frozen one morning in the snow; as a … More On digging up the past: Mary Casanova’s "Frozen" inspired by true events in Koochiching’s early 1900s history.
Moishe from Where the Wild Things Are. Image via Flickr. But the wild things cried,Oh, please don’t goWe’ll eat you upWe love you soAnd Max said:“No!” And we roared our terrible roars, and gnashed our terrible teeth, and rolled our terrible eyes, and showed our terrible claws, but Maurice Sendak stepped into his private boat … More Kenneth B. Kidd: Goodbye, Maurice. And thank you.
Children look at picture books at school in Santa Clara, Utah, in October 1940. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. BY NATHALIE OP DE BEECKAssociate professor of English at Pacific Lutheran University and author of Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity. ——- The New York Times recently published a piece on … More Rethinking the American children’s picture book
