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On a warm Friday evening, most of the lights were out at the Coffman Union bookstore on the U of M campus. In the back, though (the place is the size of a department store), a hundred chairs were set up and people milled about, greeting one another and conversing in English, Arabic, and Somali. Some of the women were covered; most, however, weren’t. In typical Arab fashion, the scheduled program started a little bit late.

Kathryn Haddad eventually stepped to the podium. “Welcome, everybody, to the release of the eighteenth edition of Mizna, the United States’ only Arab-American literary journal.”

Mizna began in Minneapolis in 1999 as the brainchild of Haddad, a playwright who is also the journal’s director. These days, it’s in libraries and universities all over the country and the world, and has received honors from the Utne Reader and Pushcart Press.
Between the program’s opening, a moment of silence for the wars in the Middle East, its closing, coffee and sweets, and a peaceful Minnesota evening, there were readings from Mizna’s new issue. The inspiration for the material fell between those disparate worlds, too.

The crowd members’ diversity, shared equally among Arab-Americans, African-Americans, and European-Americans, was rather unique for a literary event in Minnesota. The third of these groups was primarily middle-aged and seemed mostly indifferent to fashion, favoring instead practical clothing, canvas bags, and pins with messages. At least three pre-program discussions were fueled by loathing for the current administration. The Arab-Americans and the African-Americans, who were mostly Somali, appeared, in general, more professional in their style and less overtly liberal.

The first reader, Ahmed Yusuf, was Somali, which seemed slightly incongruous given Mizna’s focus. “We struggled with that for a while,” said Haddad after the event, “but we eventually decided to include anyone who can speak to the Arab-American community.” Yusuf’s sing-song delivery of a story about an underdog soccer team from a blighted Somali town addressed sport, rivalries, and war-induced poverty—subjects that would surely have resonated in most Middle Eastern countries. Yusuf rolled his r’s just like an Arab, so delicately that even if he had spoken about raids, interrogations, and external rendition, the inattentive would easily have been lulled into thinking his words were almost sweet. They’re not, of course, and politics were understandably at the heart of many of the other featured readings.

The subject matter wasn’t all the expected politics, however; the readings didn’t always begin and end with a pro-Palestine stance and anti-Bush rants. Poet and playwright Ismail Khalidi was born in Lebanon but grew up in Chicago. In the two poems he read, he directed the same vitriol toward “Chicago’s finest” as he did toward the occupiers of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. While the first arrested him on the way to sunrise prayers and barked ignorant orders, the second “stripped Gaza of their pride and ego.” Khalidi questioned the motivations of the police with as much heartache as he questioned Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet, about a proper response in the face of Israeli occupation.

Brooke Anthony, a volunteer at KFAI radio, read two poems inspired by news coverage of the war in Iraq. She looked every bit the longtime activist behind the podium, a woman opposed to war on general peace-loving principle. As a native-English speaker, she didn’t quite pronounce the names in her poem correctly—the kh in Khayat sounded like a straight hard k, not a soft, gentle, throat-clearing sort of kh. And the r in Ibrahim didn’t roll as charmingly as Ahmed Yusuf’s r’s. In a way, through her imperfect language, Anthony showed that the American cultural struggle to blend aspects of ourselves isn’t restricted to newcomers.

Amid all the strife and difference, this blending, as individuals and as Americans, is at its sweetest when there is a recognizable common ground. Mazen Halabi, who was born in Syria and now works as a software consultant in Fridley, approached the podium with the humble grin of someone who more often reads to his children than to a crowd. His voice gaining in confidence, he told a story of his childhood in Damascus. With the tale’s adolescent humor and grumpy sandwich vendors, Halabi painted a picture that didn’t sound much different from that of a Minnesotan childhood’s—until a friend was taken away by secret police working for the Syrian dictator Hafez al-Assad. But then, grieving mothers are common to stories from all over, too.

Amid Somali soccer matches, the Chicago police, the anti-war movement, and the secret police, the topic of a poem by P.A. Pashubin, a Polish-American, stood out. She compared the plant purslane to Republicans. While it’s considered a garden weed in this country, several pairs of Arab eyes lit up as she passed around samples of the leafy culprit. “I know this,” one man said. “This is baqli, we use it in fatoush.” The traditional salad of Lebanon, fatoush is served at every important meal. What is viewed as pernicious here is regarded as delicious in a country somewhere else in the world, and as the purslane made the rounds, that typically contradictory notion was not so much reconciled as recognized.

The call came on a cloudless weekday afternoon. “Hey, it’s Luther, I’m going to take off early and fire up the parabolic.” Needless to say, I rushed right over.

“Fire” is not exactly the right word in this instance, as the only flame involved in the parabolic’s operation is more than ninety-one million miles from Earth.

“Luther” is Luther Krueger, a crime prevention specialist with the Minneapolis Police Department, and “the parabolic” is the German SK14, which looks like a satellite dish four feet in diameter, a shining concavity of aluminum that reflects the sky above Luther’s South Minneapolis backyard.

Krueger collects and builds solar cookers. When I arrived, he was dropping potatoes into a pot held fast above the parabolic’s focal point, which can reach a thousand degrees.

The SK14 is the glittering gem of Krueger’s collection, but, an hour later, the yard was cluttered with other models. There’s the twenty-dollar Sunspot, made of cardboard and plastic that folds into a Trivial-Pursuit-sized box. The HotPot is basically a casserole-within-a-casserole surrounded by reflective panels. The Tulsi–Hybrid has a heating element for cloudy days and packs up like a red suitcase. One model, by the Sunstove Organization, is made out of salvaged aluminum lithograph plates from old printing presses.

In the two years since he caught the solar bug, Krueger has amassed about ten different models and given away a half dozen homemade ovens—the Hallacy model—built out of plywood, glass, and insulation. Most heat to between 250 and 350 degrees, and, with a little patience and sunny skies, can cook breads, beans, stews, casseroles, meat and fish, cakes, cookies and pies—anything you don’t need to sauté or fry. “Last summer, I put on twenty pounds,” Krueger said.

Krueger’s wife arrived home just in time for dinner—moist, delicious salmon, soft potatoes, and near-caramelized garlic in bubbling-hot olive oil. She’s all right with her husband’s hobby. “He could be rebuilding motorcycles,” she said.

For Mike and Martha Port, solar cooking is more than a novel way to bake their daily bread. The couple cooked their first solar meal—beef roast with potatoes and carrots—in 1988. Almost twenty years later, their locally based Solar Oven Society, a project of the non-profit Persons Helping People, has produced and sold nearly five thousand ovens in more than forty countries. The goal is to provide people in developing countries with a safe way to cook and pasteurize water without the laborious collection of fuel, related deforestation, and harmful fumes produced by open fires in poorly ventilated kitchens.

Martha Port told of women in Kenya who walk seven hours a day, six or seven days a week, to collect firewood.

To fulfill their mission, volunteer sponsors transport the recycled plastic Sport Solar oven to developing countries, sometimes one or two ovens at a time. The society has conducted four larger pilot projects that sent Sport Solars by the hundreds to the United Arab Emirates, Nicaragua, Haiti, and Afghanistan.

Currently, the society is working on a major contract that will deliver thousands of ovens, Port said, but full details have not been announced.

Port related her story of bringing the first prototypes of the current Sport Solar to Haitians on the island of La Gonave. Nine people were trained to teach others how to cook with the sun.

After the weeklong course, Port sailed to another village on the island to find that one woman from the training had walked home with the Sport and “was already telling a crowd of fifty to sixty people about it,” Port said.

“The environment, nutrition, health, economics—it’s win, win, win,” Port said.

Most of the solar society’s ovens must be purchased either with money or “sweat equity,” Port said. “Things that are free aren’t valued as much,” she said.

The Solar Oven Society is just one of the organizations worldwide preaching the gospel of solar cooking. While Krueger supports the cause, he is not sure he’s seen the perfect philosophy yet. He’d like to see a self-sustaining system, in which local people not only use but manufacture and profit from the ovens.

Back in the United States, Krueger lent me his Sport Solar, which I “fired up” in the backyard before hosting friends for the final match of the World Cup in July. The sun-cooked veggie quiche was a clear favorite over the pesto pizza prepared in a conventional oven. So far, though, my solar-cooking career has ended there; the tree cover in our yard limits me to mid-morning brunch. Ironically, it will take a little deforestation for me to truly join the ranks of the solar-cooking fanatics.

On a Minneapolis fall morning, arriving buses plant casual-Friday-dressed workers along Hennepin Avenue. At most stops, jean-jacketed and khakied women and polo-shirted men stream out, but the passengers who disembark at 730 Hennepin are a different variety. They run the gamut of fashion, from dress shirts and polished shoes to hijabs to basketball jerseys to “Mean People Suck” T-shirts. As they drift into their building just a spitball’s distance from First Avenue, they attract the attention of the Hennepin Avenue crowd, which is exactly what Joel Gibson wants.

Gibson is executive director of Lincoln International High School, an alternative school whose student body is made up exclusively of immigrants and refugees. Established in 1997, Lincoln receives funding from the district; students find out about the school through social service referrals and word of mouth. Numbering nearly three hundred, the students hail from a dozen countries, though most are from Ecuador, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Alternative schools like Lincoln are run by organizations that use district money and their own methods to educate at-risk populations. “Once they get the tools they need to fit into society, they will enrich it,” says Gibson. The school raises three hundred thousand dollars beyond the money from the district to have the small class sizes and individual attention that will allow students to learn English, get job skills, and become collaborative members of society.

On the wall of the five-story school, “My Life” posters plot the paths of individual students from the countries where they were born to their arrivals in Minnesota. One story begins on a farm in Mexico and ends at an after-school job loading trucks at a fruit distributor. Another student tells of being born in Mogadishu to a businessman father, then fleeing to live among his grandmother’s camels in northern Kenya before finally coming to Minneapolis.

The past year was one of adjustment to the new location: new buses to take and more stairs to climb. During passing time, the school explodes with the sounds of slamming lockers—a novelty at the new site, as is hot lunch. The school newspaper brags about the new basketball team and, though many of the students’ cultures disapprove of dating, the school has organized a prom.

Many of Lincoln’s students have lived through war, terror, and other intense traumas. Some have arrived without parents and other family members, and about a third have never before attended school. They are older students, most between eighteen and twenty-two years old, with mustaches, marriages, and children. For some, the main objective can simply be learning to sit through classes for an entire day, along with learning English; for others, it involves navigating more complex social norms.

Suad Mahammud, a Somalian seventeen-year-old clad in a stylish turquoise skirt and hijab, is happy to rave about the school. Because she had attended school and learned English in Uganda, after her family had left Somalia, some friends and family were puzzled by her decision to attend the “immigrant school.” However, for Mahammud the decision was part of exercising her right, in America, to make choices. She wanted to attend a school where there is no violence, where students listen to and respect teachers. “We are all here for one goal,” she says.

There is an overwhelming sense among the students that despite their efforts, they and their school are going unnoticed. While the students who are in the country as refugees feel more secure than their immigrant classmates, there is still a permeating sense of otherness. The school’s downtown location is a step toward a solution to that segregation, as are planned internships and other interactions with the downtown business community. One of the reasons the school moved downtown from South Minneapolis last fall was to bring visibility to this hidden population. Even the orange and blue awnings that flutter outside the building were chosen not to show the school’s colors, but for their eye-catching combination. “If people would come in and check it out, they would see that we are trying to be the best people we can be,” says Mahammud.

Mahammud’s history teacher is screening All Quiet on the Western Front. Mr. Pilgram is the classic high school history teacher, dressed in a blue cardigan and a tie printed with a world map. An American flag-print Puffs box sits on his desk. “They’re burning books here,” he says, pointing to the movie screen. “Book?” one girl puzzles. Her classmate turns to her, whispers “B-o-o-k,” and opens and closes her hands in the international symbol for book.

Michael McGillis is at the Franconia Sculpture Park, standing in a pile of cut-and-scattered wood. He’s wearing shorts, heavy work boots, and a straw hat, and is looking sweaty and overwhelmed. His work in progress, Paper Cut, isn’t really turning out the way he’d planned.

He began by digging a curving trench; in his mind’s eye, he would then lay cut wood horizontally on either side of the trench, so that people could walk through it and feel like they were parting the Red Sea, only they’d be parting the trees, stacked like cordwood and towering over their heads. “People become the cutters themselves,” notes McGillis of his original vision. A visitor would feel enveloped, overwhelmed—kind of how McGillis seems to be feeling now.

He and his helpers don’t dig for long before they hit the water table. So much for the deep trench. He also isn’t able to get as many of the white and red oak and ash trees as the project required. As the installation is developing now, you’ll have to be really short to get the total experience. But all of his sculptural installations seem to have gone this way, McGillis admits. “It’s about improvising.”

When McGillis is finished, you won’t be able to really see the installation from a distance because it will blend in with the landscape. But up close, as you walk into it, the experience will be quite different. Like some of his other pieces, McGillis will paint the ends of the trees an unearthly, iridescent color. “Maybe a blue,” he says. “I want it to be a bright, almost impossible space.”

Which is exactly what Franconia is for the artists who travel there to work for various periods of time and at various points in their careers. Some, like McGillis, who is here on a Jerome Foundation grant, have already built successful careers as sculptors. Others are moving toward that goal; still others are just getting started.

I had pictured a summer at Franconia as the sort of bacchanal for sculptors that the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference is supposed to be for writers. But here McGillis was, actually puzzling over his art and trying to get his project done so he could go home to his wife, toddler, and newborn.

His work is one of the first pieces to be installed on Franconia’s new site. After renting land for eleven years, the park will soon have a permanent home on its own land, down the road about half a mile from its current spot. John Hock, Franconia’s founding and artistic director, works tirelessly to keep what one of the interns calls “a sculptor’s paradise” thriving. Somehow, he’s hooked up with Slumberland, which has entirely furnished the new house where the sculptors will stay with items including leather couches that are sure to get plenty of use in the coming months. The Jacuzzi (which came with the place) has already been the site for a number of physics experiments. It’s a two-person tub, but it turns out you can actually get about eight people in it. Of that water-displacement exercise, Hock says with a snort, “We proved that water flows downward.” Aha. This is what I was waiting to hear.

Back at the original park, Coral Lambert comments matter-of-factly to a passing middle-aged guy who’s covered in dust and powder: “You’re dirty.” Indeed, this place is a beehive of filthy sculptors. Getting ready for the hot metal pour the next day, the artists are taking turns breaking up the old radiators and theater chairs that will become tomorrow’s art, and putting the finishing touches on their molds.

Tonight, they will stay up as long as it takes to get their projects ready for pouring. How early they rise on any given day “depends on how much you’ve had to drink the night before,” smirks one of the interns, but tomorrow they’ll all be up early. Which is not to say you can’t both work and play hard. I go on a cold-beer run with Melanie Van Houten, a faculty member at St. Kate’s who is spending part of the summer here by helping out and working on her own stuff. Tomorrow, she’ll be “mold captain,” in charge of lining up the molds and orchestrating the pourings. Everyone who goes anywhere near the molten iron, the temperature of which ranges from 2,750 to 3,000 degrees, will be wearing heavy leather and work boots.

The fruits of all this labor will be on display in September, when Franconia hosts one of its last shows on its current grounds. The mid-career artists really do seem to be working on their art, and while they might enjoy an occasional moonlit skinny-dip in the nearby St. Croix River, it’s up to the interns to keep things carnal. I happened to walk in on two of them while making my way to what I thought was the bathroom. After knocking, I opened the door and found the artists covered in sheets from the shoulder down, engaged in a pleasant mid-afternoon conversation about sculpture and form, no doubt.

But of course, art is an exploration of the human experience. One good-looking young man explains the process of drilling holes in the molds for pouring and venting. “There’s a lot of heat and pressure building up,” he says.
And sometimes you’ve just gotta blow it off. I overhear stories of late-night underwear dancing (a male intern wears a leopard-print thong for such occasions), and a particular evening spent underneath a large sculpture. “There were a whole bunch of us,” says one artist-in-training, “and we were butt naked and playing the trombone.” So that’s what the kids are calling it these days.

Lisa LaVerdiere is clearly tired of being asked the question: “How do you remember all their names?”

“I tell people, ‘Didn’t you go to high school? Don’t you know two hundred people?’” she asks incredulously.

The 225 or so animals that reside at Home for Life in Star Prairie, Wisconsin, may look interchangeable to most people, but as LaVerdiere, who founded the sanctuary, points out, “They’re all individuals to us.” And, unlike high school students, most of the animals have only one name to remember. Good, solid names like Max, Sailor, Kobi, and Sherlock.
Once you hear their stories it will be hard to forget their names, either. They are the unadoptable, the throwaway pets no one wanted. Some are aging companions whose owners passed on first. Some were abused, such as Nike, an Alaskan husky who was born lame, which may have been the only thing that kept him from suffering the fate of his mother and littermates—being used as a bait dog for pit bull fights. Others were merely mishandled by busy people wanting an accessory, not a responsibility.

Those animals that survived to call this forty-acre sanctuary on the banks of the Apple River home live better than some of the so-called pampered pets of the suburbs. The dogs reside in air-conditioned miniature townhomes bordered by flowerbeds. They are exercised and cared for by a staff of twenty full- and part-time people, and visits by the public are limited to prearranged times: “This is their home, not a zoo,” says LaVerdiere.

Dogs romp in a fenced field, where a large tortoise named Goliath occasionally joins them after being outfitted with a homing device—a flag stuck in a funnel that’s been strapped on to his back with an ace bandage. Cats, many infected with feline HIV or leukemia, lounge on beds in large, sunny rooms, along with their roommates, rabbits (called honorary cats) and caged birds.

The sanctuary was created to reflect the animals’ perspective. And, unlike shelters, which LaVerdiere refers to as the canine equivalent of “mixers in high school where you’re on display [while] waiting for someone to ask you to dance,” Home for Life allows the animals to live with dignity. The home’s residents come from all over the country, and LaVerdiere does her best to accommodate all the requests she receives.

Adoption can be a happy ending or an odyssey of being shuffled from home to home. About one-fourth of the adopted pets are returned, she says, adding angrily, “Recycling is great for bottles and cans, but not animals.”

LaVerdiere looks like a lawyer in jeans and a T-shirt—confident, in charge, but not opposed to getting her hands dirty. The petite forty-six-year-old followed her father into law and “I turned out to be good at it,” she says, “which was a drag.” She now divides her time between her law practice and managing Home for Life, which requires constant fund raising to meet its fifty to sixty thousand dollars a month in operating expenses. She’s aided by sponsors from all over the U.S. and Canada, as well as the well-heeled local crowd of those who attend glitzy fund raisers and bid on art donated by the likes of pop artist Peter Max and Blue Dog painter, George Rodrigue.

The idea of a sanctuary for pets who, in another time and place, would have been euthanized was controversial when LaVerdiere founded it in 1997. “The thought was that they were companion animals, and if they couldn’t live in a home they should be put down,” she says.

Try suggesting that after watching Nike, with the aid of a canine wheelchair, chase his four-legged buddy in the upper field. Or Max, who is living out the second or third of his nine lives in comfort after someone cut off his ears, tail, and all four paws.

The animals are respected not only in life, but also in death. This September, a Native American spiritual advisor and Episcopal priest will bless a new memorial garden where river rocks with the names of the animals on them will mark their cremated remains. The ceremony is long overdue, LaVerdiere admits, sheepishly. She’s been storing boxes of ashes in her library at home, which her husband calls “creepy.”

Like any cause, the largest stumbling block is the finite pot of money and resources that has to be split among all the groups doing good work. There’s not one solution that fits all situations—nor all animals. And, LaVerdiere points out, even good decisions, such as spaying and neutering pets, can lead to problems down the road, such as a dearth of puppies that leads to unscrupulous puppy mills springing up.

LaVerdiere has a dream of expanding her network of sanctuaries to other communities. She’d also like to expand the existing location by buying the property next door. It all takes money, which means more fund raising and more oversight of facilities.

“You need heart and head in animal work,” LaVerdiere says, sighing. “You can’t have one without the other when animals are depending on you for their lives and people for their paychecks.”