Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org I'm Producer/Director Kelsey Jacobson.

The Northwoods Writers Conference is held annually at Bemidji State University and gives writers a chance to interact and receive feedback from professional writers around the world.

and bone stretched seems silvering your red world of fish sounds burbling I sing you hiccup lungs growing under skin that rises ripples when your synapse fires sweet tea.

The Northwoods Writers Conference is like many good conferences, a place where writers come, who often do their work in solitary to gather, share ideas, network, but often to take a course from an established writer in whatever field they work in, poetry, non-fiction whatever.

So it's to hone their craft, improve manuscripts they're working on and just get some general inspiration.

The instructors here are in the different genres: poetry, fiction, non-fiction.

So you have to be in one of their workshops to do that, but every morning there's a craft lecture and the various instructors circulate through that schedule so that everyone that's here can listen to what all the other instructors have to say.

So every day at 9 for the whole week we get to hear from all the instructors and pick up tips.

There's always a Q&A so even if one isn't part of a specific workshop you can still absorb information and get help and support from those talks.

My name is Bronwen Rose Tate and I'm a poet and creative writing professor.

I teach at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, but here I'm at the Minnesota Northwoods Writing conference as a student, and I'm doing a workshop with Lia Purpura and attending all the craft talks and readings and events.

I'm a poet and like a poetry scholar by training but I'm working on a new project in creative non-fiction and so I've been looking for opportunities to be a student again and sort of see creative non-fiction and what are the different lenses that people use to think about it, what are the craft terms they bring to their work.

So I'm doing a class with Lia Purpura that she's calling a makeshop rather than a workshop.

So it isn't so much focused on critique but more about reading and discussing together and then writing right alongside one another.

There are a lot of amazing writers who are here as teachers and as speakers.

Some of the ones that I was most excited about are Ross Gay who's an amazing African-American poet and essayist.

I've taught his books in my graduate classes.

His long poem, Beholding, which is this like book-length essay poem that starts by obsessively watching a clip of a basketball game and then moves on to thinking about black pain and documentary and the art of practice and like reworks the word behold, beholding, beholden.

I was excited to take this course with Lia Purpura who's someone who writes beautiful essays on looking and paying attention to things and about sort of subjects that might be thought of as indecorous like maggots or autopsies, places where maybe tidy writing wouldn't go.

My name is Marsh Muirhead and I'm a local so it's fortunate that the conference is right here.

I've been coming to this, most years since it started, and I'm a writer of poetry and non-fiction, fiction.

I know the staff a bit, I've known Sean for many years, and some years I come and take a workshop.

This year I'm auditing so I can participate in most of the stuff, I'm just not taking a workshop.

I've done a lot of different kinds of writing, even as a little kid I was kind of a writer of bad poems, and over the years I've done some journalistic work, I wrote for some magazines, aviation magazines and other publications, reviews, commentaries in the local newspaper and on public radio.

Also have been writing poetry, fiction, Haiku and other non-fiction for many years.

I'm part of the local literary community.

We have a writers group and I help conduct the every other month poetry slam we hold here in town.

Bemidji has an extremely strong artistic community in general and a very strong literary community.

There are a couple of different writers groups, there are poetry and story slams, there are workshops.

Over the years we've been home to quite a few famous writers.

One of the current best known writers would be Will Weaver who's written a lot of novels and YA stuff who's here.

So yes but Bemidji is unusually gifted in that way and rich.

Well, they have different instructors every year and most of them are very well known.

So if you're kind of a fan of writing and read various journals and magazines you will say, oh this year Aimee Nezhukumatathil is coming or whatever.

So it's like going to a different movie every week or every year.

A whole group of writers, sometimes it's nice to once you've signed up or know who's coming you can read their stuff so when you meet them you can ask questions and be further inspired by your favorite, one of your favorite writers, or someone that you've known and respected for some time.

So a different slate of authors every year always makes this conference unique every year.

The same way I look down at my hands now, everything so plain, even my pain which I thought anyone could see.

Part of what's special and important about this conference is that there can be a sense that writing happens mostly in urban centers or in coastal areas and so I think to have a writing conference that brings such like powerful writers really at the top of their field to teach, you know, in a rural area, in a place where people who maybe can't go to New York for a conference or can't fly somewhere else can come and can feel like this is in some ways the center of literary culture, at least in this moment, I think reconfigures where interesting work happens and what interesting work can come out of.

For me right now I think I've spent so much time teaching that it's a gift to be a student again and I think it refreshes my teaching as well to sit there in that perspective of student and sort of say like oh I worry about this as a teacher but from a student I appreciate it so maybe I can worry a little bit less.

It's beautiful to come to Bemidji.

I've been living in Vancouver along the ocean but I've missed lakes and so to be in a place that feels like the lake kind of holds the space so fully has been really lovely and to be here for the solstice and to be able to swim in the lake on the longest day of the year has been really beautiful and I also I've been struck by the fact that we're holding events in the American Indian Resource Center and I can tell that it's a place that values its connections to Indigenous history and I think that's something that a lot of other places are behind on.

At UBC, where I teach, there's also an attention.

We have, you know, an Indigenous library and we have the long house and you know there's space for Indigenous students and so I'm very conscious of how important that is and so it really like filled me with joy to walk in and see, you know, there's a kitchen the importance of food right and seeing the beautiful artifacts and history there has been really moving.

Well it's a tremendous thing that there's a writer conference.

I'm kind of a literary groupy.

I'm a writer and an avid reader and I go to a couple of other writer conferences most years and this is one of the best in the country and it has an excellent reputation and again it's local.

I also attend one in Montana and one in Florida in January, for the obvious reason, but this is just wonderful and the writers here are always some of the best people in the country, always instructors.

There's a great ambiance here because it's a crossroads of the natural and the human world.

We're not distracted by being in a big city and it's inspirational as writers are, you know, spiritually connected to the natural world so it's a perfect setting.

I've been coming to the Northwoods Writers Conference for many years, I think since its inception 10 or 15 years ago, either as an auditor some years or maybe about half the time as a student under one of the instructors.

I first met Steve Grandarril, the person I would fall in love with and marry, in 8th grade.

We signed up for the same elective, a mass media class taught by Mrs Delisle.

The class wasn't quite what I wanted, I expected to take journalism, but the teacher who taught it previously, my English teacher in... Sean Hill is a very well-known poet, he spent some years here in Bemidji, I think part-time on the faculty at least and then he now he's out in Montana, but a wonderful poet, he's got several good books out, fantastic organizer, a kind and generous person who is very welcoming and probably the perfect person to run a thing like this.

My name is Sean Hill and I am the Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference Director.

I started working with the conference in 2004, the first conference that was put on was in 2003.

I was invited to help after the 2004 conference because I'd given Susan a good recommendation apparently.

I told her about the poet Derick Burleson and that he would be a good teacher and he came and he was.

So I started working with Susan, we worked on the conference, and our last conference was in 2008.

Put it into hiatus, part because of recession, and she was retiring, was trying to figure out what to do with the conference let it take a break and so we did.

And then in 2012 I was adjuncting here at BSU and the then chair of English Department, Professor Larry Swain, knew that I'd, heard that I'd been working on this conference in the past and he was like do you want to maybe bring it back and I said sure.

I'm going to read some sonnets and a few post poems and a few little tiny poems.

So the first one's a sonnet called Sweet Tea.

A single changed event would mean a different child unfurling inside where that heart grew and still so each small spoilage broken apple broke an ankle burnt apple caramel I decide to read as choreography what led to this as fogs filled over the basin of the hill I chilled my voice to the blue raspberry ice artificial and distant describe days ways I bled and flush and clot now back the sphere I house a slow advance.

Lockdown was March 15th and by then we had all of our workshops filled.

We open for registration I think March 1st and they filled in a few days, all the slots, and so we had to pivot.

We had to refund people and reimagine what we could do, a virtual platform.

So Sarah and Sean worked to build a space for us virtually and we carried on the conference for 2 years virtually because of the pandemic.

We came back last year for the first time and we're back again.

Last year was it felt like a sort of halfway step between the pandemic and sort of where we are today.

You know it feels really good to be back and be able to see people's faces and be in fellowship.

You know, I don't put on parties that much right but it's kind of like putting on a big party and we're all celebrating like poets, novelists, essay writers, and stuff.

It's really cool for us down in the Twin Cities, from around the area.

We also have people come from around the country and occasionally people come from outside of the country.

Emily Gao, Em, she was one of our interns from another university.

It was the first time last year that we had student interns that weren't from BSU and it was just one of those things was it presented itself.

One of our past faculty members sort of reached out and said hey I have a student.

My name is Emily Lu Gao, most people just call me Em.

I am the visiting intern.

I myself also am a multi-genre writer and this year I'm a bookseller and also interning for Amy who's one of our amazing professors for the program.

I'm based in Jersey City right now which is also known as the Lenape land, but I grew up in Southern California.

What brought me to the conference was that I had a really great time last summer, I worked I think the exact same roles maybe some other hats but those were my two roles last year too, visiting intern, book seller and I just really enjoyed it so I wanted to come back.

Yeah I heard about it because one of my professors over at Ruttgers-Newark, where I just finished up my grad program, Brenda Shaughnessy she knows Sean Hill, and I think, I can't remember when but she taught here, and so she kind of gave me the hookup and I'm here now.

Yeah I finished my MFA in Creative Writing at Ruttgers-Newark and my concentration was poetry.

I have a completed manuscript now so I'm just polishing it up and hopefully going to send it out and have a book in the world.

The Northwoods Writers Conference is a in general all the workshops are generative and just to get into some jargon a lot of writing conferences are more like you bring a set of poems and you kind of sit in a circle and you get a bunch of like critique.

That is some people know how to give good critique, other times it's kind of shady.

So one of the perks here is that most of the workshops are generative which means you're just creating new work and there's not that stress of like oh my God strangers are going to judge me.

It's a great place to meet other writers cuz most writing gets done in isolation so that's really great.

You get to work with some of your favorite writers depending on who's teaching here right and you get to just go to really cool like craft talks and like this year we're doing a lot of like authors and conversation and then like they also bring in like agents and editors which is like I feel like unless you're really embedded in this world of literature like you just would never have access to that like I know I never did before coming here yeah.

Well I think first of all visiting interns bring a little like out of town pizzazz to the group because most of the other interns are previous or current students at BSU.

That's not meant to sound shady I just think it's like a different perspective to the pool of you know interns and staff and I also think it's just helpful when participants meet me because it's like a lot of participants are also coming from out of town so it's kind of like a note of relatability but honestly I think us interns whether you're visiting or not are just like trying to help wherever we can help from like setting up the arrangement of classrooms to I mean I also sell books.

We're also supposed to keep an eye on our not that like the teachers are like wandering or meandering or anything like that but we're just supposed to track where they are whether it's the hotel or here.

I think it's always asking myself the question of like how can I be useful right now or what can I be doing right now and always asking you know core staff like Matt or Sarah or Sean like do you need help.

So it's kind of hard to answer like one thing I would just say like being useful cuz a lot goes into making a conference happen.

Sean Hill is a friend but here he is the conference director.

He is a really friendly talented writer himself, multi- genre writer, and I don't know how many years he's been doing this but he's incredibly seasoned.

But for me, beyond that, he's a really great friend, mentor.

I think my job one of my jobs in living in this world is recording it and I think part of recording it is being faithful to the interconnected nature of our lives.

Then I cannot create work in some kind of isolated silo, that would be inauthentic and untrue.

I think a lot about the failure to connect when I'm asking myself about that responsibility and those questions and how do I do that work if that's my work and want to do how do I do it and I think it's really important for me personally to divorce myself from the idea of...

I heard about it first when I was living in Vermont and I think I might have seen it around the like the scholarship opportunity through the New Poets of Native Nations Scholarship which I ended up applying for and then I actually told my friend Anna who lives in St Paul about it and we've known each other since university in 1999, we lived down the hall from one another in university but we never actually took a class together cuz I was a literature student and she was a geography student but we're both here now.

So I flew from Vancouver into Minneapolis and we spent a few days together with her children and then drove here.

For the conference there's a sort of application process but not terribly intimidating.

You express interest in a specific workshop and you send a sample of work and then I think I'm not sure who reviews the samples if it's the people who are leading the individual workshops or the director Sean but then it's kind of a rolling process.

So I think as certain workshops fill there might still be spaces in others.

People that are interested in the conference should be confident that they're welcoming novices, beginning writers here as well as established writers and that mix I think makes it very comfortable for people of all levels.

And if you've never attended one before this is a great one to sign up for next year about this time and even if you think you're lacking a little direction or confidence you'll build that here, during the sessions.

It was my first writing conference ever and I have never lived or I yeah I guess I've never lived in a small town before, which is kind of funny because growing up in San Diego I think my, no I know my friends and I would often joke like we got to get out of this sleepy town, we have to get out of this small town, and now like actually being in a small town I'm like what were we thinking we were so silly.

So yes I would definitely say the actual just like what do people do here I wondered what people did for fun.

It's a great place to write because of the lack of things to do and I, you know, like most I feel like it's kind of cheesy but it's so beautiful here it's amazing.

This conference was Susan Hauser's vision at one point right but I ended up in helping her believing that vision and carrying it on.

She taught here, lived here, and wanted to bring writers of a certain caliber to Bemidji to engage with other writers who wanted to learn and with the community and being a part of that community I was like I'm for that too.

There's a lot of people who are in the Twin Cities, a lot of talented writers in the Twin Cities, a lot of opportunity for people to learn in the Twin Cities, a lot of writers come through the Twin Cities from around the nation but you know her vision was to bring writers from around the nation up here, people who might not get this far north and I was like yeah let's do that.

I, you know, pride is an interesting word but I have certain pride about this place that I consider one of my homes and I like showing it to people, I like sharing it with people, and that's a big part of what this conference is, it's a lot of sharing and that's why Bemidji.

in part, right.

It's beautiful, there's the lake, you know, there's the people, it's just like I think one of our taglines is you know we're at a small university on a big lake in a small town in northern Minnesota and that combination of things just feels right, you know.

I'm very partial to this conference right, obviously.

I would love everyone to come see what we do up here.

I'm also struck every time I talk to faculty and participants, attendees who come, who are like this place is special, this isn't like any other conference.

I'm not sure, like I hear what they're saying, but I'm like I think we're special, I'm just overjoyed whenever someone tells me that it's special.

Thank you for watching Common Ground.

If you have an idea for a Lakeland PBS production in north central Minnesota, email us at legacy@lptv.org or call 1-800-292-0922.

To watch Lakeland PBS productions online, visit lptv.org or download the free PBS app.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at bemidjiairport.org.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.