Wisconsin and Minnesota
Sep. 5th, 2023 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerGreetings from Minnesota! It has been some time since I posted, but in my defense, travel has kept me quite busy...
Things that have happened in the last week!
1. I continued writing away at Bjorklunden! I wish I had gotten the draft up to the point where I needed to start writing new material before I went to Bjorklunden, as that might have been a better use of my time than minor revisions as I ported material from previous drafts into the current draft... However all work is good work, and I did get those revisions to the point where it's time to dive into new material.
2. After Bjorklunden, I spent a weekend in Appleton, the town where I went to college. The main downtown area has changed some (including the addition of one Voyageur Bakery, where I paid $2.50 for toast and jam and got a PILE of toast, with THREE kinds of bread, white and rye and raisin, and two kinds of jam too, spicy peach and raspberry rhubarb. My God, I would have lived on this as a student), but the college is much the same, and I was pleased to meet up with three of my favorite professors!
I gave each of them a copy of one of my books: my Russian professor got Honeytrap (as the Russian department is name-checked in the historical note), while the two history professors each got The Sleeping Soldier. One of them read the back cover and cried, "Anthony Rotundo!", which was extremely validating as I did indeed draw heavily on Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900"!
3. Then a quick visit to Pepin, where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born. There is a replica cabin on roughly the spot where the Little House in the Big Woods stood, although now it's more of a Little House in the Cornfields, but even so I was so delighted to visit the place and walk through the cabin (it's so small! I mean, she calls it a little house, but... so small) and then take the road into Pepin afterward, the very road Laura took when she went into town to cross Lake Pepin on the ice to start out for the prairie.
(The gentleman at the desk in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum gift shop kindly assured me that it probably is the very same road, although of course paved now: "There are only so many ways to get around the bluff," he explained. It's very hilly country around Pepin, which I hadn't realized from the book.)
4. Then on to Minnesota! And on and on, and onward still, for while the middle of Minnesota was 98 degrees in the shade, Duluth was a balmy 76... So I went to Duluth and drifted through the Duluth Rose Garden and had a delicious chocolate croissant from Duluth's Best Bread (I did not sample Duluth's Other Bread for comparison, but the chocolate croissant was A+) and at last visited the Lake Superior Railway Museum, where they had among other things vintage train menus!, and also a chance to take a 75-minute train ride, and one of the cars was a vintage 1918 Pullman coach, and no one else wanted to sit in it (they were either in the air-conditioned car or the open car) so it was MINE, ALL MINE.
I also greatly enjoyed the chance see the inside of caboose inside the museum, and clamber up a ladder that was basically just some giant staples in the wall up to some high seats! Not sure if they intended for visitors to do this, but it wasn't actually cordoned off....
5. And now I am in North Branch, where I lived when I first started writing Sage twelve years ago, and on which Sage's hometown is loosely based. (This book is - as Monica Dickens commented on her Mariana - "the novel that is everyone's second book (if it was not their first), based on my childhood and growing up," although transplanted into Minnesota, partly because I was living there at the time but also partly for reasons of plausible deniability.)
Tomorrow and the day after will be devoted to gathering some local color for the book. (In particular, I need to go hiking in Taylors Falls.) Then on to Minneapolis to visit the U and the Museum of Russian Art (again for local color, although the Museum of Russian Art is also just for funzies), and then--
Mankato! A weekend immersed in Betsy-Tacy!
Things that have happened in the last week!
1. I continued writing away at Bjorklunden! I wish I had gotten the draft up to the point where I needed to start writing new material before I went to Bjorklunden, as that might have been a better use of my time than minor revisions as I ported material from previous drafts into the current draft... However all work is good work, and I did get those revisions to the point where it's time to dive into new material.
2. After Bjorklunden, I spent a weekend in Appleton, the town where I went to college. The main downtown area has changed some (including the addition of one Voyageur Bakery, where I paid $2.50 for toast and jam and got a PILE of toast, with THREE kinds of bread, white and rye and raisin, and two kinds of jam too, spicy peach and raspberry rhubarb. My God, I would have lived on this as a student), but the college is much the same, and I was pleased to meet up with three of my favorite professors!
I gave each of them a copy of one of my books: my Russian professor got Honeytrap (as the Russian department is name-checked in the historical note), while the two history professors each got The Sleeping Soldier. One of them read the back cover and cried, "Anthony Rotundo!", which was extremely validating as I did indeed draw heavily on Anthony Rotundo's "Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900"!
3. Then a quick visit to Pepin, where Laura Ingalls Wilder was born. There is a replica cabin on roughly the spot where the Little House in the Big Woods stood, although now it's more of a Little House in the Cornfields, but even so I was so delighted to visit the place and walk through the cabin (it's so small! I mean, she calls it a little house, but... so small) and then take the road into Pepin afterward, the very road Laura took when she went into town to cross Lake Pepin on the ice to start out for the prairie.
(The gentleman at the desk in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum gift shop kindly assured me that it probably is the very same road, although of course paved now: "There are only so many ways to get around the bluff," he explained. It's very hilly country around Pepin, which I hadn't realized from the book.)
4. Then on to Minnesota! And on and on, and onward still, for while the middle of Minnesota was 98 degrees in the shade, Duluth was a balmy 76... So I went to Duluth and drifted through the Duluth Rose Garden and had a delicious chocolate croissant from Duluth's Best Bread (I did not sample Duluth's Other Bread for comparison, but the chocolate croissant was A+) and at last visited the Lake Superior Railway Museum, where they had among other things vintage train menus!, and also a chance to take a 75-minute train ride, and one of the cars was a vintage 1918 Pullman coach, and no one else wanted to sit in it (they were either in the air-conditioned car or the open car) so it was MINE, ALL MINE.
I also greatly enjoyed the chance see the inside of caboose inside the museum, and clamber up a ladder that was basically just some giant staples in the wall up to some high seats! Not sure if they intended for visitors to do this, but it wasn't actually cordoned off....
5. And now I am in North Branch, where I lived when I first started writing Sage twelve years ago, and on which Sage's hometown is loosely based. (This book is - as Monica Dickens commented on her Mariana - "the novel that is everyone's second book (if it was not their first), based on my childhood and growing up," although transplanted into Minnesota, partly because I was living there at the time but also partly for reasons of plausible deniability.)
Tomorrow and the day after will be devoted to gathering some local color for the book. (In particular, I need to go hiking in Taylors Falls.) Then on to Minneapolis to visit the U and the Museum of Russian Art (again for local color, although the Museum of Russian Art is also just for funzies), and then--
Mankato! A weekend immersed in Betsy-Tacy!
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Date: 2023-09-06 02:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-06 08:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-06 02:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-06 08:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-07 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-08 12:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-06 12:41 pm (UTC)One of them read the back cover and cried, "Anthony Rotundo!"
I love this. They saw what you did there!!
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Date: 2023-09-06 08:55 pm (UTC)I have never been called out on the historiographic background of a novel so swiftly or so delightfully.
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Date: 2023-09-07 10:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-08 12:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-09-06 07:47 pm (UTC)There is a replica cabin on roughly the spot where the Little House in the Big Woods stood
Oh wow, how cool! I would love to visit there one day. :D
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Date: 2023-09-06 08:57 pm (UTC)I expected the cabin to be busy, since I visited on Labor Day, but I was the only one there until just before I left, which gave a little extra sense of what perhaps it would have been like when it was an isolated cabin in the woods... so quiet.
no subject
Date: 2023-09-06 09:11 pm (UTC)Awesome! *makes note*