The English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies department invites the UMD Community to celebrate the end of fall semester on November 29 with a social gathering and reading in Kirby Student Center 355-37. Arrive any time after 5:45 p.m. for conversation, appetizers, wine, beer, and non-alcoholic drinks. The reading will begin around 6:15 p.m..
We are happy to feature two writers working in the short essay/memoir form. Chicago writer and storyteller Paula Carter will read from her new flash memoir, No Relation, and UMD American Indian Studies Professor Linda LeGarde Grover will read from her new book of short essays, Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year. An informal discussion will follow.
Paula Carter
Paula Carter’s essays have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, TriQuarterly, Salon, and Southern Humanities Review. She is a professional freelance writer who has contributed to publications including Writer’s Digest and Creative Nonfiction. Based in Chicago, she is part of the nonfiction storytelling community and a company member with 2nd Story. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Indiana University, Bloomington, where she was the Darrell Burton Fellow in Creative Writing and fiction editor for the Indiana Review.
On No Relation: When Paula first met James, she was 26, in graduate school, and not ready to be any kind of mother to his two young sons. But, years later, after caring for them and watching them grow, she finds herself unsure of what to do when her relationship with their father ends. In No Relation, a collection of striking flash essays, Paula reveals the complexity of loving children who are not her own and attempts to put language to something we have no language to describe. No Relation is a deeply personal, beautifully rendered account of a seldom-remarked on kind of love and loss.
Linda LeGarde Grover
Linda LeGarde Grover is author of fiction, poetry and essays and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her work has received the Flannery O'Connor Award, the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Fiction Award, the Red Mountain Press Editor's Prize, and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. She is a wife, mother and grandmother, a lifelong student of Anishinaabe Mino Bimaadiziwin, the living of the good life, and lives here in Onigamising, Duluth, Minnesota.
On Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year, Linda reflects: "We are lovers of stories who have learned that everything that we experience, no matter how small, is a story. Here in Onigamiising, this place of the small portage, the stories we live as individuals are filaments of an unbreakable thread upon which are strung the beads that are our collective story, an always emerging pattern of reverence that is Anishinaabe existence. The essays that comprise Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year are one woman’s single bead on that thread: what I have learned and thought about here in Onigamiising and now pass on, an Anishinaabe-mindimoye’s perspectives on contemporary and historical Ojibwe life in northeastern Minnesota. Our existence is a beautiful thing: Onishishin."
LeGarde Grover is a professor in UMD's Department of American Indian Studies.