Author: Jeannine Ouellette

How did I get so slovenly? Can I blame it on my upbringing, fraught with stringent housekeeping rules and rigorous cleaning chores from an early age? Is it the necessary byproduct of a creative temperament? Or am I just lazy?

I leave my dishes in the sink, on the table, or worse yet, in the bed. I toss my coat on the back of the nearest chair and my shoes in the middle of the floor. I tuck my keys wherever I’ll be least likely to find them again, and I abandon my purses in the seats of grocery carts as a karmic test to the next shoppers.

The cheese and cracker crumbs on the kitchen counter are mine, the stray toothpaste cap was my doing, and my coat pockets are overflowing with forgotten lipsticks, receipts, stray beads, and hairy lintballs.

Don’t jump to conclusions. My home is a pretty place. For one thing, my partner keeps house like a doting granny. But even I value a beautiful, orderly environment enough to work against my own nature. I clean in fiery, maniacal bursts. The bleachy smell of a clean bathroom lifts my spirits. I paint, I arrange, I rearrange, and most of all, I hide things. I am a lover of drawers, especially. Some people use desk drawers for pens, pencils, and paper clips. Mine are stuffed with more fascinating debris: yarn bracelets, loose potpourri, candle stubs, rocks, stale candy, paper wads, photos, sugar cubes, grapefruit oil, empty match books.

My younger sister, a self-described obsessive, finds this intolerable, and has long claimed that my tender-heartedness toward little dishes and baskets and bowls of odds and ends with no discernible purpose—pretty or not—is the root of all evil. But I’m not convinced. Sometimes doo-dads pay off. A few years ago, I got seized by the irrational impulse to clean out the kitchen junk drawer in the wee hours of Christmas Eve. I was short of cash, and worried about the modest sum of money I’d spent on gifts for my kids and family, and maybe I was channeling that anxiety into the desire to make the house perfectly tidy right into its crevices. In any case, when I’d finally emptied the drawer, wiped out the last crumb, and sorted every coin, coupon, scrap, petrified gum stick, and old check stub, I discovered one stub that was in fact an uncashed check from two years prior, for exactly the amount I had just spent on Christmas.

So while a dear, well-meaning friend once whispered to me in a cautious way that life’s journey is less stressful in a clean car, I find something potent about small pockets of clutter, something fertile. When left undisturbed for long enough, they become still life artifacts of the past in a way a journal can never quite achieve. Recently I emptied out a closet to move my enormous and unwieldy collection of clothes from one hanging rack to another, and I discovered an old handbag that I haven’t used, according to the receipts it contained, since 1998.

The zinc throat lozenges had liquefied in their wrappers and the lacy ankle socks are now far too small for anyone in the family, reminding me with a cold punch that I no longer carry anybody else’s tiny socks on my person. But the four dollars in loose change was legal tender, and the small pewter statuette of the Virgin Mary was an enigma.

Based on my own eccentricities I cannot very well expect my kids to be neatniks, nor have I loaded them up with chore charts or subjected them to the dreaded ritual of Saturday morning housework. My guidelines are far less clear but ultimately more authentic for a slob like me: Put your shoes away when you walk into the house and help out cheerfully when you’re asked. Most of the time, this works fine.

It’s not too hypocritical and it reflects the basic standards I set when my oldest child was just learning how to speak and think and sort out the oddities of growing up with a mother like me. We were riding in the car, me at the wheel and she in her car seat, and she dropped whatever sticky thing she was eating onto the car floor. She shrieked for me to pull over and give it back to her.

“No,” I explained, “you can’t eat it now. It’s dirty.”
“I don’t care!” she yelled. “I like dirt!”
“But Sophie,” I reasoned. “It’s on the floor of the car, it’s covered with icky stuff.”
“Like what?” she demanded.
“Like . . . dog hair,” I offered.

She contemplated in silence before pointing out that we did not have a dog. Fair enough. But she did quiet down, and as far as I can tell, I convinced her to avoid eating scraps from floor mats, which is good enough for me.

A few weeks ago, more than 150 friends gathered to honor Kalid Al-Bakri’s life. They remembered him as a kind and good man, gunned down by robbers as he filled in for his brother at a South St. Paul convenience store. Then they lowered him—in accordance with the rules of his faith—into the ground at the Islamic cemetery in Roseville. Islamic rule number 627 states, “It is not permitted to bury a Muslim in the graveyard of the non-Muslims, nor to bury a non-Muslim in the graveyard of the Muslims.” On American soil, you can’t discriminate against the living, but the dead may be a different story. Cemeteries can and do exercise prejudice—most often by creed.

Most Jewish cemeteries, for example, won’t bury gentiles. “We’ve talked about it,” said Michael Morris, general manager of the Minneapolis Jewish Cemetery at 70th and Penn, one of several Jewish cemeteries in the Twin Cities. “We have an area in our cemetery that is designated for mixed couples,” he explained. This flexibility is a relatively new phenomenon among Jewish burial grounds in the last 10 to 15 years. “And our mixed couple area is a separate section—it could even be considered a separate cemetery, since it isn’t technically part of the same grounds.”

Furthermore, the gentile plots have to be purchased by a Jewish individual for the non-Jewish partner. “If a non-Jew wanted to be buried here without any connection to a Jewish spouse, well, then the answer would have to be no,” said Morris. “But then, I don’t know how many gentiles are interested in calling up and buying a lot in a Jewish cemetery.”

Which gets at the gist of the matter. Under what circumstances would someone want to be buried in a cemetery representing somebody else’s faith? “I did actually have a gentleman call up,” Morris recalled. “He was not a Jew but he said he had great admiration for the Jewish people. He was now at the end of his life and wanted to be buried among Jews. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to accommodate the guy. I felt it was a little unfortunate, but that was the decision of the board of trustees.”

Morris said he doesn’t feel great about having to turn someone away, but he wants to be clear that at a certain point, you have to draw the line. “A Jewish cemetery is a Jewish cemetery because it is designated for Jews and Jewish law requires Jews to be buried among Jews.”

Ron Gjerde, executive director of the Minnesota Cemetery Association, said he for one doesn’t think exclusivity in burial plots is much of an issue. “Most cemeteries today are nonsectarian and nondenominational, and even for most religious cemeteries, faith is not necessarily an issue in buying a plot,” he said. “I believe you can be buried in a Catholic cemetery whether or not you are a Catholic.”

If you own land in the country, and you have your heart set on resting in peace in your own little apple orchard, could you? “Probably not,” said Gjerde. “Let’s put it this way. Any individual or organization could follow the laws and work with their local communities to establish a cemetery—more or less. But we would be kind of digressing if we were to do that. Way back when, there were a lot of these ‘family cemeteries’ that were established on the family farm. Well, the family farm has gone by the wayside, and those cemeteries have too, ending up essentially abandoned.”

To be buried in your own backyard is, of course, a most extreme way to isolate your remains from both the living and the dead. Most humans seem to want something in between: to be buried among their kind. Perhaps allowing this discrimination in death does something to encourage its opposite among the living.—Jeannine Ouellette

I suppose I’d be a better writer if I could hold my liquor. After all, plenty of U.S. winners of the Nobel Prize for literature—from Sinclair Lewis to William Faulkner to Eugene O’Neill to Ernest Hemingway—were friendly with the bottle. Liquor as a literary lubricant dates back to the authors of the U.S. Constitution. According to Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader, the U.S. National Constitution Center discovered material in 1992 that drives the point home: “One document that survived is the booze bill for the celebration party thrown two days before the U.S. Constitution was signed on Sept. 17, 1787. According to the bill, the 55 people at the party drank 54 bottles of Madeira, 60 bottles of claret, eight bottles of whisky, 22 bottles of port, eight bottles of cider, 12 bottles of beer and seven large bowls of alcoholic punch.”

This is terrifically bad news for lightweights with a penchant for the pen. Try as I might, I just can’t get my writing gene and my drinking gene properly connected. When I’m hemmed in by deadlines, a glass of wine takes the edge off just enough to scoot me from the keyboard to the couch. A second or third glass starts me into a frenzied bout of chatting and a spark of sexiness that ends abruptly with sudden-onset narcolepsy. Sorry to say, I’m a much better writer (and a livelier date) on the single-drink plan.
Truth is, since I’m rather chronically underslept, my greatest hope of high achievement may lie not in rum but in Ritalin. It seems the controversial attention deficit drug is now being used by college students who want to stay awake for finals and research papers.

A study of Ritalin abuse on campus, by Dr. Eric Heiligenstein at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, found that one out of every five students he interviewed had used Ritalin or similar drugs without being diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder—the typical reason people are prescribed the hefty stimulant.

Whatever happened to No-Doz? Or even coffee? They’ve been bested, it seems. Ritalin is said to have the power not only to keep you awake, but to increase your concentration and focus, as well.

Student.com reports that a single Ritalin pill commonly sells in the dorms for $5 to $10. If the aim is to get high and forget about the finals, then illegal users may crush it into a powder and snort it, or smoke it, or even mix it with a liquid and inject it.

Not surprisingly, the effects of Ritalin on students without attention disorders have not been evaluated (particularly in its crushed and injected forms). But good old common sense is sufficient to suggest that anything in the wrong quantity or combination can be dangerous—or deadly.

Overall abuse of prescription drugs is an increasingly common problem for college and high-school students across the country, and federal drug officials say Ritalin is among the top controlled prescription drugs reported stolen in the United States.

The fact is that the United States consumes 90 percent of the world’s Ritalin, and production of Ritalin is up 700 percent since 1990. An estimated 6 million American youngsters take Ritalin or another drug for ADHD. Ten to 12 percent of all boys between the ages of 6 and 14 in the United States have been diagnosed as having ADD.

Now, none of this means that the next burning trend will be Ritalin abuse among writers with low tolerance for alcohol, but then again, who would have predicted Ritalin for toddlers? Even those in the very middle of the Ritalin debate were disturbed by a recent Journal of the American Medical Association article showing the number of Ritalin prescriptions were exploding for toddlers as young as two, for alleged ADHD.

Ritalin for toddlers can only underscore the central question of exactly how much activity, distractibility, and impulsivity constitutes a “disorder” in children under five, or children in general. Show me a two-year-old without “ADHD symptoms” and I’ll predict she’s asleep.

Just like me after two glasses of wine. Which leads me to believe that perhaps it’s not Ritalin we all need, but more naps. Granted, frequent napping is not, as far as I know, a trait widely shared by my literary heroes, but nevertheless I’m happy to test the theory myself… just as soon as I get myself another cup of coffee and polish off my deadlines.

Once, when my daughter Sophie was about two years old, I dragged her to a big, noisy birthday party at Circus Pizza, where she had been on only one previous occasion. That, too, was for a big, noisy birthday party about a year and a half before. When we arrived at the second party, Sophie looked up at me intently as a far-distant look spread across her face. “I remember this place,” she said. “I ate cereal here.” And believe it or not, she was right. I had fed her baby rice cereal when she was five months old at that very same Circus Pizza a year and a half earlier.

The nature of time, memory, and experience intrigues me a lot. I’m right in the throes of a fascinating book—Old Souls: Compelling Evidence from Children Who Remember Past Lives. I bought it primarily because I loved the title and the cover, but it turns out to be a lively read, and it reminds me immediately of two things. First, the uncanny feeling I had about my daughter Lillie the minute she was born, when I squeezed her warm, wet arm, and I felt the physical presence of my beloved Aunt Lala (Alice) all around me. Since the first minute she could speak and name things, Lillie has repeatedly chosen the name Alice for everything in sight. Second, this book has sparked my recollection of a singular experience with the potential of my own previous incarnations.

It was back in the last days of December 1999 when I drove with my sister Laurie down a dark, quiet street in an ordinary St. Paul neighborhood. In my wallet was a wad of cash. I needed $60 for the hour-long psychic consultation my sister had talked me into scheduling.

Sitting down with a clairvoyant had been Laurie’s idea, but since she was an out-of-towner in from New York for the holidays, the business of tracking down referrals, sifting through them, and choosing the most promising seer had been left to me. Now here we were, ten minutes late, skeptical of course, but having a good time doing something novel and indulgent and sisterly.

My appointment was first, and it began, just as you’d imagine, with a greeting from the very assertive and overly affectionate house cat. The woman standing in the shadows behind the cat was large and rather stern. She led me into a stark room off the front hall where we sat across from each other on the only two chairs in sight, separated by a small table. The first thing she did was scold me for being late. “The spirit,” she told me, “arrives on time.”

It got better from there, for she quickly began to rattle off some interesting observations about my daughter Sophie. First of all, she spoke of Sophie’s unusual and profound affinity for animals. “She’s going to be devastated when she figures out where meat comes from,” the psychic told me. “She’s been a vegetarian since birth,” I replied, struck by the memory of a child who refused to walk down the meat aisle in the grocery store and wept inconsolably after learning, at age four, that the Chicken in a Biscuit cracker she’d eaten at a neighbor’s wasn’t purely plant based.

Eventually, the conversation turned toward the distant past. I learned, much to my unabashed delight, that prior to this lifetime I’d been a prominent Russian ballerina. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine anything I’d rather have been. It was like drawing the trump card on past lives.

The psychic said I was very talented and a raving beauty. Everyone loved me—when they weren’t fleeing from my dramatic temper. My one true flaw, I was told, was a tendency to be tyrannical (when I was not being lavishly generous and witty and adoring).

In this lifetime, I was born on the other side of the tracks, and was simply not the kind of kid who got to do things like take ballet lessons. In fact, I somehow developed an aversion to dancing, a dreadful self-consciousness around it, what you might even call a rhythm and music impairment. (I did study the violin, briefly, until my sister tore me from it permanently by stomping on my instrument. But we’re both over that.)

Now, pondering my supposed past life as a ballerina makes me want to go buy a pair of toe shoes and tear up the floor. I think it’s a tad too late for me to become the next Billy Elliot, though. But that’s okay. There are other avenues. Do I really have to be ashamed to consider, with relish, the idea of ballroom dancing lessons? I think not. After all, you only live once. Er, I mean, life is short. So we have to make the most of it.

For starters, let’s say that I’m not going to write about the election or the war. You and I have both been around the block enough to recognize that I am no Bill Hillsman, and nothing I say is going to change your mind on these matters. This is because you are a stubborn creature who is determined to see things your own way, and who, just like me, mostly recycle your threadbare thoughts over and over, rarely allowing anything new to cross the threshold of your imagination.

Nine out of every ten thoughts you think today are the same ones you thought yesterday and the day before. And the few stray novel ones aren’t likely to be revolutionary, since they had to fight their way through the heavy-duty security system you employ to scare off anything that doesn’t validate your current belief system.

That’s why it’s such a mind-boggling privilege to work with kids as I do. Kids think new thoughts every day, and, I believe, catalyze the adults around them to think new thoughts as well. But the touchy issue is that the thoughts the children think don’t come from the ether. They come from me, or whoever else stands in front of them. Is anyone fit for that kind of role?

The first time I walked into the classroom and looked out at 23 children’s faces “looking up, holding wonder like a cup,” the enormity of the responsibility was nearly paralyzing. It was immediately obvious that when I spoke, these children believed me. About everything. This is handy when you are setting out to teach something tricky—say the alphabet, or how to read, or complex mathematical concepts like carrying and borrowing. If I tell them they’re smart and talented and capable and that they’ll soon be able to do everything that comes in front of them, despite the confusion and struggle, they genuinely trust my optimism. This dynamic has been a powerful inspiration in my classroom—and that’s nothing new, since research has shown repeatedly how teacher expectations for students tend to be self-fulfilling. Over time, students internalize the beliefs teachers have about their ability, and they rise or fall to the teacher’s level of expectation.

Some would call this, tritely, the power of the mind. A watered-down version of levitating a spoon with your brain, which for some reason I have never been able to do. But still I can’t understand why the power of thought is so under-rated, when reams of good research—from a variety of disciplines—back it up so compellingly. As my friend Sean said to me the other night, “Oh yes, you do like scientific studies, don’t you?” And the answer is yes, I do, because on the one hand, I find sociology and anthropology endlessly fascinating, and on the other hand, every once in a while a grown-up will believe something I say if I provide peer-reviewed statistical evidence to fortify the claim.

The placebo effect is a fantastic illustration of all this. When researcher H.K. Beecher published his groundbreaking 1955 paper, “The Powerful Placebo,” he concluded, based on analysis of 26 studies, that an average of 32 percent of all patients respond to placebo. This average has held constant in all the years and studies since. “Expectation is a powerful thing,” says Robert DeLap, M.D., of the Food and Drug Administration, in an interview for FDA Consumer magazine (January-February 2000). “The more you believe you’re going to benefit from a treatment, the more likely it is that you will experience a benefit.” (I’m not convinced this justifies one particularly well-publicized study sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, in which half of the Parkinson’s disease patients enrolled in the trial underwent a “placebo” surgery in which doctors drilled holes into their skulls but didn’t implant the potentially beneficial human fetal tissue in their brains, but I suppose that’s a tangent.)

The point is, there’s more to this stuff than a bunch of mind-over-matter New Age psycho-babble. And as I said, when you work with children, you don’t really need a scientist to tell you that perception becomes reality. But while children’s perceptions are malleable, most adults are bogged down by a pattern of thinking that has grown so stale a sledgehammer could hardly dent it.

This is why instead of swinging a sledgehammer over the election or the war, I’m going to do something more likely to make some small difference: pry my mind open a crack to make room for a few new ideas. Tough going, but stand by.

Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.

It’s not as if I wasn’t expecting it. With tall genes scattered on both sides of the family, my kids were bound to surpass my (almost) 5’3” status eventually. But still it gave me a jolt to see my daughter Sophie’s shoulder edge above mine by a good inch when she sidled up to me before the full-length mirror. Sophie is also about my weight and build, and has been hearing every day of the 12 years since she was born that she looks just like her mother. But this has never been quite so striking as now.

The other day after school, exhausted and buzzing with the energy of the day, I walked into my classroom and was shocked to see myself sitting at my own desk. It was Sophie, of course, but with her hair piled loosely atop her head and her face angled against the muted northern light, I could have sworn she was my grown-up look-alike.

It’s the weirdest thing how the more she looks like me, the less I recognize her for herself. For example, Sophie flew to New York in August to visit my sister, and when I picked her up at the airport, her siblings Max and Lillie in tow, I stood at the gate perplexed as Max cried out, “Sophie!” “Where?” I asked, not realizing the lanky adolescent in the fur-lined vest and hoop earrings six feet in front of me was my daughter.

It wasn’t the fur or the hoops that threw me off, although they didn’t help (thank you, Auntie). It’s simply that when I’m looking for Sophie, I’m expecting to find a familiar little girl who I fail to believe exists only in memory. The girl my daughter has become is as much woman as child, and to further complicate things, she is utterly unlike the girl I was at her age. (Sophie: beautiful, smart, confident, conversant, and an ardent fan of the classics in literature and theater. Me at 12: awkward, smart, roiling pit of insecurity, perpetually tongue-tied, and an ardent fan of Gilligan’s Island and The People’s Court).

Despite our differences, I can keenly relate to many of Sophie’s experiences as she encounters and endures the rites of passage en route to womanhood. For example, Sophie has now reached the exciting age where she can earn some money of her own through babysitting. Having spent several of my own adolescent summers running from one babysitting job to the next, I appreciate the enormity of what Sophie is undertaking as she assumes responsibility for unrelated children and gains entree into the private lives of friends and neighbors. When Sophie told me that at one job she spent the evening singing the four children to sleep one by one, it made me love her fiercely and reminded me just how indelibly the babysitting experience impresses itself upon young girls.

I remember a powerful essay I read in an unassuming little newsletter for parents of girls. I felt a tingling chill of recognition as the writer spoke plainly about the age-old rituals of babysitting—gorging on potato chips and ice cream after the kids are in bed, watching too much TV, gabbing on the phone all evening, and, the guiltiest pleasure of all, snooping. I didn’t know back in my babysitting days, as I searched cupboards and rifled through a drawer here and there, that I was doing more than passing time and assuaging boredom. It took a sharp essayist to point out to me so many years later, when I was hiring babysitters of my own, that a babysitter’s stolen peeks are haphazard attempts to pry into the mysteries of her own future: marriage, motherhood, sex.

By the time a girl is of babysitting age she knows about as many of her parents’ secrets as she can tolerate. But the fresh material inherent in unfamiliar households—the food in the cupboards, the bills stuck to the refrigerator, the photographs on bureaus, and the contents of drawers—is the possible key to understanding what it might mean to grow up.

As for Sophie, she’s Red Cross certified and super competent, and since I’m generally only a few doors away if she needs me, I feel pretty good about her babysitting commitments. Of course, I hope she behaves herself when she’s out there, and I would certainly never condone her snooping around, although I’ll probably never know. And the truth is she hasn’t had much chance to slack on the job, since in her short career she’s navigated one real fire, one false alarm, and a short-circuited kitchen timer that caused the buzzer to blare for about three hours. The relentless noise drove the youngest child to melt down and the oldest child to predict Sophie’s likely firing. Ahh, Sophie. You’ve only just begun.

Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.

When I bought a house in Prospect Park four years ago, I chose the area for the beautiful trees, stately homes, winding streets, and The Loft. Only after the papers were signed did I discover that The Loft was relocating from its long-time home in the beautiful old Pratt school building to a swanky new space on Washington Avenue under the auspices of a complete literary community center to be known as The Open Book. The slap of disappointment I felt passed pretty quickly, because, after all, it was still a great house in a lovely neighborhood, and anyway, it turned out that the materialization of a vision as ambitious as the one behind The Open Book—home also to the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and Ruminator Books—was symbolic of all the reasons this is a great town for writers.

Minnesota is readily acknowledged as an extremely fertile environment for writing, but not so many realize that we’re also home to a healthy handful of acclaimed literary presses whose lists have garnered the attention of critics nationally, and whose freedom to take risks and publish daring work for its own merit rather than for the bottom line has attracted writers with the muscle to interest any number of New York houses. Arguably some of the best new work in the most difficult to publish genres—poetry and short fiction, as well as the novel and memoir—is finding a home (or at least a house) right here in fly-over country.

Holy Cow, New Rivers, Graywolf, Ruminator, Milkweed, Coffee House… these are not trendy herbal teas. They’re six impressive literary presses among a growing number of Minnesota book publishers whose reputations have begun to make this a destination of significant literary interest. But the Minnesota publishing scene is not limited to the literati, either. There are over 60 publishers here, churning out everything from manuals and scientific tomes to school texts. Lerner Publishing is actually one of the largest independent scholastic publishers in the country. And our market boasts a cadre of self-helpers and some impressive liturgical presses, as well as Llewellyn Worldwide—the largest new age publisher in the world, conjuring up an average of 100 titles per year.

“We’re the third largest center for publishing in the country,” says Brad Vogt, board member of the Minnesota Book Publishers Roundtable, an organization that’s been promoting and networking the industry for more than 30 years. “We have over 70 members in the group and some really passionate and respected people,” says Vogt. “You go to other places beyond New York and San Francisco and there’s nothing like what we have here.” Vogt recalls his own brief encounter with celebrity at a national book expo last year. “I was walking around a corner and suddenly there was this big picture of Fiona [McCrae, publisher of Graywolf]. She’s really known in the industry.” Now if you’re not on a first-name basis with Fiona and wouldn’t recognize her picture if it were on a box of Wheaties, you might have to stretch a bit to appreciate the point Vogt is making. But in a business where, unless you get chosen by Oprah, you work steadily along in relative obscurity regardless of whatever success you achieve, Vogt’s anecdote is worth something.

Margaret McConaghay, chair of Graywolf’s board, concurs with Vogt. “We’re probably better known in Boston and New York, but among people who really know literature, our attention is international. We have lots of people writing and we get submissions from all over the world. We’re publishing an Iraqi poet this fall. We think it’s an important role to bring new voices from all over.” That philosophy, exercised at a rate of about seven books a year, makes Graywolf Press an industry powerhouse. But it doesn’t come easy.

These local presses, like most artistic endeavors, have largely been brought to life by a solo visionary who chugged quietly—but doggedly—along for years, sniffing out talent and frequently publishing first works, nurturing authors, creating a catalog, cultivating a vision and a readership… and frequently accumulating award after award along the way.

Milkweed Editions, a unique collaboration between artist Randy Scholes and writer Emilie Buchwald, published its first book in 1984. That same year, Allan Kornblum opened the doors of Coffee House Press. He started out with a homemade poetry magazine in the 70s, a “rite of passage that everybody did,” and turned his endeavor into Coffee House. That same year, Graywolf, which had been around since 1974 in Port Townsend, Washington, moved to the friendlier funding waters of Minneapolis. Between the three of them they represent a catalog of over 500 books. “People on the coasts know we’re here, that’s certain,” says Kornblum. “There’s a real community that’s evolved.” Fiona McCrae says, “We have a sort of critical mass together. People realize across the nation that there’s something unique here.”

“Other presses around the country are jealous,” says Lisa Bullard, a writer who’s worked on and off for a number of local publishers for many years. “The fact that there’s more than one press gives us a forum to talk and get together, to figure out overlap and ways we can work together. Open Book grew out of that kind of talking.” Creative energy of this sort is crucial in a vocation as solitary as writing. “I come from New York, but being here is terrific,” says Kornblum. “I love having first-rate peers at Milkweed and Graywolf. I have the highest respect for Buchwald and McCrae. I really value giving them a call, exchanging info, bitching a little. It’s a pleasure being in a town with The Loft, the Center for the Book, Ruminator. It’s great to be a part of it.”

Lisa Bullard explains the niche these publishers have carved out for themselves as similar to baseball’s “farm leagues.” New York publishers can’t take the risk on new authors, but their pragmatism leaves a void for others to experiment. This often becomes apparent at big trade shows. “New York editors would come to our booth and practically weep, saying, ‘Oh you get to do that, you get to publish real books!’” says Bullard. “These are people who love books too, but their concerns are mostly commercial. They have to rely on us to find the raw talent and take a risk. They can’t nurture someone’s career. Editors are moving constantly, and nurturing an author is not a long-term prospect anymore.”

Even at the best small presses, the commitment to cultivate talent over time is no small task. But slowly, against the tide of chain stores, return contracts, and limited advertising budgets, rewards can eventually emerge. After 18 years of effort, Emilie Buchwald received in September the McKnight Foundation’s annual Distinguished Artist Award, which recognizes “those individuals who, individually and collectively, laid the foundation for the rich cultural life Minnesota enjoys today.” Buchwald says, “It’s quite wonderful. They do it simply to make the point that in different areas of the arts there are contributions that call attention to many art forms. This award is something that brings Milkweed into prominence, but it also shines a light on all literary publishing activity. I’m delighted to be the first in local publishing and also the first woman to receive the award.” We can surely expect similar things from the local coterie of true literati.

On a related note, RainTaxi’s “Twin Cities Book Festival” takes place October 12 at International Market Square in Minneapolis.

Jeannine Ouellette is the associate editor of The Rake.

As we speak, the conservative men’s religious/political organization, the Promise Keepers, are right smack in the middle of their 2002 National Conference Season, and on September 6 and 7, they’ll be rallying at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. “In 12 years, we have held 140 stadiums and arena events, reaching 4.8 million men. And yet our focus has never changed,” says PK founder Bill “Coach” McCartney, a former University of Colorado football coach. “We’re still keeping promises, one man at a time.”

Which isn’t as heady as one million men at a time. A mere five years ago, on October 4, 1997, between 600,000 and one million men descended on Washington D.C. for the PK gathering “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men.” It was the largest religious get-together in U.S. history. After that last stand, PK attendance bottomed out and the organization suffered massive cutbacks. That nose-dive, however, was mostly the result of dropping the entrance fee. Promise Keepers thought if events were free, they’d raise attendance and get by on passing the hat. Instead stadiums sat empty, and, adding insult to injury, the average donation at events was a measly $4. Since the ticket price was reinstated ($69 for the St. Paul event), attendance has been on the climb for two years running, and financially speaking the PKs are “doing fine.”

The St. Paul event has a capacity of 10,000 men and boys. According to Fred Ramirez, event organizer and director of U.S. Ministries at the PK headquarters in Denver, more than 4,000 seats are already booked. Ramirez says the “Storm the Gates” theme for this year’s conference is a metaphor for storming the gates of Hell, and has nothing to do with storming anyone else per se. “It’s a battle that men must fight against our own worst nature,” he explains.

This sets my teeth on edge. But why? Who am I to judge a bunch of guys hanging out and staging mock crucifixions to praise God, expressing their feelings, and committing to keep their promises to their wives and children? After all, do I want my son to be a Promise Breaker? Maybe I do, if the alternative is for him to embrace the misogynistic, homophobic, racist underpinnings revealed in the rhetoric of some prominent Promise Keepers (despite the organization’s fervent denial of all that leftist whining).

As McCartney puts it, all you men out there need to “Sit down with your wife and say something like this: ‘Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake… I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role…’ I’m not suggesting you ask for your role back, I’m urging you to take it back… There can be no compromise here.” This is the brand of infamous and widely reproduced quote that gives the Promise Keepers a bad name with arm-chair feminists like me. That, and the fact that although women do most of the grunt work to pull off these glitzy events, tickets are for men only. “But women can buy tickets and go to any event,” protests Ramirez. “Women are never barred from attending. Women are just discouraged from being at the events because they are really geared toward men. Men are the guys who don’t understand in terms of emotions and all that. Women are far ahead of us, so we have to work harder with the men, because they don’t get it.”

This, according to Ramirez, explains why up to two-thirds of the 300 to 600 volunteers scrambling behind the PK scenes are female. “The reason we get such a large number of women volunteers in because they want to free their men up to attend the event. The women support us 100 percent.”

If my instincts are right, the time is ripe for a PK resurgence. The outrageous popularity of the fire-and-brimstone Left Behind novels reveals a mass-culture inclination toward just the sort of highly moralistic message that PKs deliver with unparalleled panache. Noteworthy, as well, is the position of one of the most fiery and controversial PK leaders, Tony Evans, as one of George W. Bush’s closest spiritual advisors. During the presidential election Evans told the New York Times that Bush “believes that God has a place in government, that religion has a place in society, and it is not to be marginalized and put on the periphery as though it is some sort of extra. There is no America without a theistic world view.” And that, I predict, is a promise the PKs will surely cash in on.

Jeannine Ouellette is associate editor of The Rake.