Early Bird Writes the Book: An Interview with Author and Hamline Grad, Lucie Amundsen, on the Benefits of Early Morning Writing, By Jessica Lind Peterson
Early Bird Writes the Book: An Interview with Author and Hamline Grad, Lucie Amundsen, on the Benefits of Early Morning Writing, By Jessica Lind Peterson
I wish I was a morning person. I really, really do. I wish I rose early enough to witness the morning sun kissing the horizon on its way up, to hear the birds early morning chatter. But I am not a morning person. Not even a little bit. I’ve tried everything from programming the coffee pot timer, setting multiple alarms, going to bed early. I’ve threatened and chastised myself. I’ve even bribed myself with doughnuts. But it’s hopeless. I like to sleep. As a writer/mom/theater producer/full time graduate student I recognize my anti-morning attitude is not ideal. I constantly feel behind in my work and wish there were more hours in the day. I could get a lot more writing done if I could just get my butt outta bed before the kids woke up.
Since I’m a serial snooze-pusher and have no actual wisdom to offer, I turned to early bird writer and recent Hamline grad, 
Lucie Amundsen (MFA ‘14), for inspiration. A Duluth-based writer, Lucie started an industry-changing egg farm, worked a day job, raised two small children and got her MFA all while managing to write the beautiful, award-winning book, Locally Laid. Lucie is my hero. Also, who better to be the star of my Early Bird Blog Post than an author who actually writes about birds? You’re welcome.
Jessica: Have you always been an early bird writer?
Lucie: I’ll admit it; I’m a morning gal so getting up early just feels right to me. But conversely, I pretty much lose my sense of humor by 10:00 PM, so I pay the price at night.
Jessica: Do you have a special morning ritual that helps with grogginess?
Lucie: I love that special groggy part of that morning. I’ve re-framed it into thinking it’s a creative period. Am I just tricking myself? Probably, but that’s ok. Back in the 90s, I heard Kate DiCamillo talk on MPR about getting up very early to her preprogrammed coffeemaker and slinking over to her desk because she didn’t really want to fully wake up before starting to write. I took that to heart.
Jessica: What advice do you have for us snooze-pushers?
Lucie: If you leave off at a fun place in your project and go to sleep thinking how great it will be to get back at it, you might actually be jazzed about that special morning time. I stopped setting an alarm altogether when I was writing hard on the project. I was just that excited to work on it before the rest of the day rushed in on me. It was always sad when I realized I needed to start the family morning hustle and then go to work.
Jessica: Is your early morning writing time always productive?
Lucie: It’s almost always productive. I have to be careful not to get sucked into reading the news online or checking Instagram or Facebook. If I can stay off those traps, I usually write well.
Jessica: What time do you wake up?
Lucie: When I was finishing the book, I was up and writing at about 4:15 AM (I know, I know) but now that I’m bereft of a big juicy project, I’m sleeping until 5:30. I wake kids and start making lunches at about 7:15.
Jessica: Do early morning writers have to also be early go-to-bedders?
Lucie: Yeah…I’m usually in bed around 9:30 so I can read for 30 minutes. This writer’s life is not a glamorous one, but I like it.
There you have it. Thank you, Lucie, for inspiring us all to get our pa-tooties outta bed and make some morning magic. And while you’re up, do yourself a favor and read her amazing book, Locally Laid, published by Penguin Random House.
To learn more about the Locally Laid Egg Company and Lucie’s work, we highly recommend checking out the company’s website.
Author:
Jessica Lind Peterson
Editorial Board Member
JESSICA LIND PETERSON is a playwright, actor and founder of Yellow Tree Theatre in Osseo, Minnesota. She has been a finalist for the Loft Short Story Contest, the Loft Mentor Series in Creative Nonfiction and the Common Good Books National Love Poem Contest. Her essays have either appeared or are forthcoming in River Teeth, Alaska Quarterly Review and Anomaly. She is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Hamline University. Visit her website here.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Chelsea Dingman
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Chelsea Dingman
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be?
My poem, “Aftermath,” was written the night of the election in 2016. I was in the process of writing a poetry collection about women who have suffered infertility and I had read some very negative comments about women in power online as I was following the election coverage. It made me think about the word “miscarriage” and all of the ways that a woman might suffer miscarriages over the course of one’s life. I was also feeling very discouraged about the possibilities for women: what we will be able to achieve and not achieve in my lifetime, in my children’s lifetime. The loss of the child and the loss of power became the backdrop for this greater negation of possibility for women.
2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?
My father died in a car accident, the winter that I was nine. I had the most wonderful homeroom teacher at the time. She encouraged me to write. I wrote her a book of poems about snow. When she liked it, I tried to write her a novel. That went less well, but it made me realize how much I loved the process of writing.
3. How has writing shaped your life?
I have always been an avid reader. I enjoy reading more than any other activity. Other writer’s words change the way that I look at and respond to the world. I write almost as an aside to that, or as a response to the excitement of what I’ve read, and the possibility that language offers.
4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?
There are so many (and I know that’s a cliché answer). A few poets whose work I so admire: Patricia Smith, Aracelis Girmay, Larry Levis, Li-Young Lee, and Louise Glück, along with many poets in translation, such as Czeslaw Milosz, Anna Akhmatova, and Wisława Szymborska.
5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
For my next collection of poems, I am researching traumatic brain injury in professional athletes, including CTE, which can only be diagnosed upon autopsy. Some of the research will be anecdotal in that I am examining the effects on both the individual and the family members.
Visit Chelsea’s website, follow her on Facebook, and follow her on Twitter.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Marjorie Hakala
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Marjorie Hakala
1. Tell us about your essay in Volume 20. How did it come to be?
My essay, “Verdure,” is about the color green in different places I’ve been. It has a very mundane origin story: It was my turn to send some work to my writing group, and I didn’t have anything new to send, so I looked around and saw the trees starting to come into leaf and decided to write about that. I took some inspiration for the structure from Amy Leach’s essay “Love,” which is about different plants with “love” in their names. It’s made of fragments that speak to each other indirectly. My essay ended up being more autobiographical than that, because I started thinking about my experiences of travel and homesickness and finding comfort in green places.
2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?
I loved to read as a kid so I wanted to write—as simple as that! I used to feel very insecure about this, because I heard a fair bit of advice that said, “You should only write if you feel you absolutely have to.” I didn’t feel an irresistible inner call, and actually being locked into one vocation because you can’t bear anything else seems pretty grim. I just liked writing more than I liked most other things, and I wanted to get better at it and be part of that conversation, and that’s still how I feel. Writing makes me feel more alive and more myself and more of a useful and vital human being in the world, which is maybe what all that advice was trying to get at.
3. How has writing shaped your life?
It’s shaped all my decisions about where to live and what to do! I moved to New York after college, but I wasn’t really happy there, and then the 2008 recession happened so there weren’t great career opportunities there either. Meanwhile I was trying to write fiction, and I just had a terrible time trying to come up with plots. At a certain point the thought, “Do they do MFAs in nonfiction?” dropped into my head, and I upended my entire life to make that happen: I left the city, taught abroad for a year while working on essays to use in grad school applications, got into Hamline and moved to Saint Paul and found a couple jobs that left my evenings free for classes. So really my entire daily life is owed to my decision to prioritize writing.
4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?
I mentioned Amy Leach already—my writing is not much like hers, but the lyrical joy in her work is inspiring to me. Elena Passarello and Donovan Hohn are two of my favorites for the way they research a topic and write creatively and passionately about it, while keeping an eye on the truth of the matter. A bunch of my favorite essays come from magazines and haven’t appeared in books as far as I know: I think a lot about Melora Wolff’s essay “Masters in This Hall,” A. Papatya Buçak’s “Eight Questions You Would Ask Me if I Told You My Name,” Zoe Selengut’s “Selling Books in Cold Places.” They all have authoritative, distinct voices and they all write about ordinary life in ways that no one else could.
5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
A bunch of things. My MFA thesis was about zoos, and it’s been on the back burner for a while now but I’m looking for ways back in, because I still care a lot about that project and I’d like to see it become a book. I’m doing some research to revise and deepen pieces of the thesis—right now I’m working my way through an old book about Egypt in the 1820s. I’m tossing around drafts and ideas for some more memoir-ish short pieces and I have a couple of those out on submission. It’s nice to have short pieces in the works so I can finish something! But I have to pay attention and not just start writing six pieces at once about different subjects, because then I don’t get the time to think deeply about any of them, and thinking deeply about things is my favorite part of writing CNF.
Visit Marjorie’s Tumblr here.
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Will Johnston
In the Field: Conversations With Our Contributors–Will Johnston
1. Tell us about your poem in Volume 20. How did it come to be?
The heart of “The Wild Plum” came from an actual experience I had, probably at age five or so, of coming across a wild plum tree while out walking, and my dad picking plums for my sister and I. It may be my oldest concrete memory (although who can say how many of the details I remember were true and how many were warped or invented over time) but for many years it was completely out of my mind. At some point last year, it popped back into my head like it had never been gone, and I was overcome by a wave of nostalgia and longing. What made that experience worth remembering, more so than so many other childhood experiences? I don’t know. What makes any of the poetry, paintings, films I’ve seen worth remembering? Hard to say. How do I make my own poems worth remembering? I don’t think that’s something I can control.
2. What was an early experience that led to you becoming a writer?
For as long as I can remember I loved reading, and when I was a teenager I planned to become a fiction writer. The experience that converted me to poetry, though, happened in my first year of college. In the textbook for an English course I took “just to get it out of the way,” I happened upon a poem by Li-Young Lee called “Eating Together“. Lee’s language is plainspoken, rich, and beautiful, and even at twelve brief lines it’s an emotional sledgehammer. I read it and thought “I want to do that with my life. I want to make people feel like that.”
3. How has writing shaped your life?
That’s a big question! It’s hard to say, since I haven’t tried living without writing. I suspect that writing has made me more attentive to the world around me, and that writing for an audience has increased my capacity for empathy and for relating with others, but those are dubious claims at best. The most probable effect (and perhaps one of the less consequential) is that I tend to reconceptualize events, relationships, and happenings as if they followed the “arc” of a poem. That is, there is an unconscious mental process that helps to shape my poems, and when I look at the real world I have sort of a sympathetic response that tells me “if this were a poem I was writing, it would have this shape and be organized in this way and follow this progression.” I sometimes find myself acting in ways that “complete the poem,” that just feel right, even though they are not necessarily in my best interest.
4. What books, writers, art, or artists inspire you and your work?
I mentioned Li-Young Lee above. Two other poets I admire are Alice Oswald and Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Both are masters of the long poem, and both create rich worlds with incredible depth that continue to grow and change for page after page. While I don’t quite have the knack of sustaining that, I do strive to reach the same kind of depth in my shorter works. There are too many others to name, but I will mention Bill Holm as well. Growing up not far from where he lived in southwest Minnesota gave me what you might call a cultural affinity for his work. It almost feels like one of my uncles talking to me. But there’s a surprising amount of wonder under that “tell it like it is” veneer. He reminds me that I can be a poet and still be true to my roots.
5. What projects or pieces are you working on right now?
At the moment, I’m working on a series of poems that deal with the ways that language and memory change our relationships with people, places, and experiences. Especially the way that memory mutates over time, and the ways that naming and describing things alters our perception of those things. I’m trying to pick apart some of the narratives I’ve built up surrounding my own life and get closer the truth of my experiences.
Beyond Toni Morrison: Top Twin Cities Bookstores For Buying Books By People of Color, By Chavonn Williams Shen
Beyond Toni Morrison: Top Twin Cities Bookstores For Buying Books By People of Color, By Chavonn Williams Shen
(Photo: Boneshaker Books table display)
Not to knock Toni Morrison, but she’s not the only person of color to have ever written a book. In a lot of local bookstores I’ve frequented I’ve had to go to the designated cultural section to find books by a person of color rather than having them on display or dispersed widely throughout the store.
I made this list to highlight amazing bookstores that have Black/Indigenous people/People of color (BIPoC) writers as a staple rather than as a token for their corresponding months. In no order, this is a list of the bookstores I believe do the most to champion communities of color.
Factors involved in making this list:
- Ownership, accessibility, and location (Are they owned by BIPoC? Are they located near these communities?)
- Books including local BIPoC writers
- Collaborations with BIPoC communities
- Diversity of experiences within selections. For example, books about Blackness unrelated to slavery/the Civil Rights era, more books about Asia written by Asians than not, Indigenous authors besides Sherman Alexie.
Owned by the legendary Louise Erdrich, Birchbark Books operates with Indigenous communities in mind, and many of their staff are from Indigenous communities themselves. Birchbark Books has a vast selection of books on Indigenous culture as well as other communities of color. I found an Ojibwe counting book for babies and a lot of tribe-specific cookbooks to name a just a fraction of their noteworthy features.
And of course, they’re never out of the latest Erdrich book, which is always a plus!
Boneshaker is almost entirely volunteer run, which gives them a lot more freedom when curating their books. Their very genre titles are revolutionary, with names like “anti-racism,” “anti-imperialism,” and “LGBTQ health.” They also have common genres, like sci-fi and biography.
Books from indie stores are inevitably more expensive than big corporations like Amazon or Target, and this can be a barrier for the bibliophile on a budget. But Boneshaker has a graphic novel library and a decent number of shelves carrying less expensive used books.
Bonus: They deliver books by bicycle within city limits for free!
Located in Minneapolis and a two minute walk from the Lake Street and Minnehaha Avenue intersection, Moon Palace is hands down the most public transit-friendly of the three bookstores mentioned. On top of featuring lots of books by BIPoC, they also host multiple events, sometimes in the same month, to showcase BIPoC writers with readings and other events.
A major plus to Moon Palace is that they have a section on their website where you can pitch your book to them. If they like it, it may end up on their shelves. Though I don’t expect this from every bookstore given the costs and labor involved, it’s an awesome practice to involve BIPoC writers in the business side of writing, as such voices are seriously lacking.
Honorable Mentions
I didn’t include this on the top list as they’re technically a publishing company that just so happens to run a bookstore. Located in the iconic Open Book building, patrons can browse Milkweed’s extensive collection while waiting for a meal at the adjacent cafe or enjoying work from many of the literary giants visiting The Loft Literary Center one floor above.
Owned by Black community organizer Chaun Webster and his partner, Verna Wong, this bookstore was the place to be for many artists of color. They lost their building in 2016, but have operated as a pop-up bookshop at various events. Here’s to hoping they’ll find a new home and be a North Minneapolis staple once again!
By far, this post is not exhaustive. There are plenty of great reasons to visit all the stores mentioned besides the ones I’ve listed. In addition, new bookstores are always opening and old bookstores are always updating their collections. I hope you’ll find a new favorite in one of these places and happy reading!
Did I miss your favorite BIPoC bookstore or want to share other reasons to shop indie? Comment below!
Author:
Chevonn Williams Shen
WSR Editorial Board Member, Vol. 21
Chavonn Williams Shen was a first place winner for the 2017 Still I Rise grant for African American women hosted by Alternating Current Press and a 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee. She was also a 2017 Best of the Net Award finalist, a winner of the 2016-2017 Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose through the Loft Literary Center, and a 2016 fellow through the Givens Foundation for African American Literature. Her poetry has appeared in A3 Review, The Coil, and is forthcoming in Footnote #3: A Literary Journal of History.
(Photo Credit: Anna Min)