I attended Bay Days to table with Wilderness Health and the North Shore Mental Health Group. It is an active group of citizens committed to increasing awareness of and access to mental health resources up the shore.
For the past three decades, the Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards have recognized books that substantially represent the history, culture, heritage and lifestyle of northeastern Minnesota. In 2021, longtime award coordinators at the Kathryn A. Martin Library at the University of Minnesota Duluth announced that due to staffing changes, the university library would no longer organize the awards. In early 2022, Twin Ports-based nonprofit, the Lake Superior Writers, announced that it would be the new NEMBA coordinators.
It was a busy weekend in Duluth, despite the rain that postponed the Fourth of July events.
Saturday I missed the Rhizomes, who played in Two Harbors. Crankily, I have decided that I will only be indoors in places with cavernous, flowing air, until the pandemic has subsided. (For more information about the pandemic that is still going on, no matter how many people you see walking around without masks, visit the Minnesota Dashboard. We’re doing okay — COVID hospitalizations are definitely flat, but variants are increasingly resistant to the vaccine.)
The new campaign to increase tourism for Duluth had, I guess, a “soft open” this week, covered in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and on Fox 21.
I attended the wolf event at Lake Superior College. It was awesome, a blending of art, science, and indigenous cultures, with representatives from the International Wolf Center, the Wildlife Science Center, Timber Wolf Alliance, Wildwoods, and the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.
The Arrowhead Regional Arts Council is accepting applications for the position of executive director. This position shapes arts and culture in Duluth and the Arrowhead, so they should want the best possible pool of applicants.
Every year, for a week, Super One Foods sells pączki, pronounced poonch-key, a specialty Polish donut. But they never do my favorite flavor, prune.
What does a man have to do to get a prune donut in time for Mardi Gras?
Students at Mater Dei open house.
I recently attended the open house at Mater Dei Apostolate in the Lincoln Park neighborhood.
The Lake Superior Freethinkers hosted Shane Courtland for a talk at the College of St. Scholastica. Courtland is a Superior native who completed an undergraduate degree at UMD, a PhD at Tulane, and now serves as a leader in the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University.
To the angel who prepaid several people’s coffee at a mall-area coffee shop on Sunday — thank you. I appreciate the kindness.
A reader has sent some information about Helen Futter, the subject (I think) of some thoughts I’ve had about record collections, midcentury media, and pop culture. (See here, here, here, here, and here.) Generally, reflecting on what (I think) was Helen’s record collection, donated by her estate to Gabriel’s Books in Lakeside, I treated her like a “typical teen,” listening to records on her “Victrola.”
Duluth’s Holy Cow! Press author Jane Yolen, author of Kaddish: Before the Holocaust and After, has been awarded the Sophie Brody Medal for 2022.
The Northeastern Minnesota Book Awards have a new organizing body, Lake Superior Writers. As a fan of NEMBA, the University of Minnesota Duluth and LSW, I think this is good news for all.
It looks like (from the Online Computer Library Center records and the books I found at Gabriel’s) Duluth Benedictine Books was a brief experiment in recording the lives and institutions of sisters who live at St. Scholastica. (I just finished a jar of strawberry rhubarb jam I purchased at their most recent jam sale — so yummy.)
I wonder whether this was a project fueled by one of the sisters? By someone determined to write down history or by someone who recognized that telling these stories could also help recruit for the sisterhood (whose numbers are dwindling)?
So, this is the last batch of records purchased at a $5 bag sale at Gabriel’s Books in Lakeside.
