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Cherewatuk's book on 'Morte Darthur' published

February 21, 2007 - Professor of English Karen Cherewatuk's book, Marriage, Adultery and Inheritance in Malory's Morte Darthur, now is available in the United States. The book was published in England last fall by Boydell & Brewer, one of the leading publishers in medieval studies.

In her book, Cherewatuk looks at marriage in the Middle ages as an institution encompassed by conflicting public and private dimensions. She examines the concept of marriage as seen in the Morte Darthur, the story of King Arthur and his knights, and moves beyond it to look at 'adulterous' and other male/female relationships, and their impact on the world of the Round Table.

Cherewatuk addresses the compromise achieved between youthful passion and the gentry's practical view of marriage in the 'Tale of Sir Gareth'; the problems of Arthur's marriage in light of political necessity and Guinevere's infertility and adultery; and the consequences of Lancelot's adultery in the tragedies of Elaine of Astolat and Elaine of Corbin. Focusing on three generations of Pendragon men, Cherewatuk also considers the myth of "benevolent paternity," by which men -- whether born legitimate or bastard -- were united through the Round Table.

 

Marsalek co-edits book on early English drama

February 19, 2007 - Associate professor of English Karen Marsalek '90 recently completed co-editing a collection of essays titled 'Bring furth the pagants': Essays in Early English Drama presented to Alexandra F. Johnston (Studies in Early English Drama). The book also contains Marsalek's essay, "'Awake your faith': Resurrection Drama and The Winter's Tale."

"It was a great experience to work with the contributors as part of this collection honoring Sandy [Johnston]," says Marsalek, whose dissertation advisor was Johnston.

With 'Bring furth the pagants,'Marsalek, along with co-editor David N. Klausner, professor of medieval literature and vice dean of interdisciplinary affairs at the University of Toronto, honors the work and career of Johnston, founder and director of the Records of Early English Drama Project. The book brings together original essays in early English drama by colleagues and students of Johnston.

Marsalek's essay, "'Awake your faith,'" surveys the tradition of performing Christ's resurrection or resurrection dramas, which was popular in England until the 16th century. "The essay looks at textual examples and identifies features typical of that type of drama," Marsalek says. She also looks at the final scene of The Winter's Tale and argues that Shakespeare works with the features of this theatrical tradition in his construction of the scene.

 

Holly publishes article in American Literary Realism

February 9, 2007 - Professor of English Carol Holly recently had her article, "Reading Resistance in Mary Wilkins Freeman's 'A Poetess,'" published in the winter 2007 issue of American Literary Realism, a journal of critical essays on American literatures from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Holly, who last month was named one of St. Olaf's Lilly Vocational Scholars for 2007-08, says the article is one of several she's written, such as her publication in Project Muse, on 19th-century American women writers.

"I've tried to draw attention to neglected writers who often have been overlooked by scholars and the literary canon," Holly says.

Holly looks at a work by Freeman, an author born in 1852 in Massachusetts, who wrote poetry, numerous stories, novels and children's books. Holly's article focuses on "A Poetess," a short story originally published in Harper's Monthly in 1890. Holly found that the story's ending -- in which the dying poetess asks a minister to write her a poem as a eulogy -- constitutes an unlikely act of resistance. As well as employing Michel Foucault's theory of resistance to "A Poetess," Holly syas she also looks at Freeman's use of gossip and sentimentality.

Holly adds that American Literary Realism has accepted another article she has written, this onthe New England writer Rose Terry Cooke, the subject of Holly's Lilly Vocational scholarship, which will examine the politics of gender, the vocation of writing and the role of religion in 19th-century writing.

 

Interview with Mary Titus

By Anne Torkelson '07
October, 2006

Mary Titus was a 2007 Minnesota Book Award Finalist in the general nonfiction category for The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter, her first published novel. The book examines Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980), a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist, essayist, short story writer, and novelist.

The idea for the book began as Titus' University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill dissertation, which she dropped for many years to work on other scholarship and learning. At first, the topic was a psychoanalytic study about language, fiction, and identity. "It wasn't until I really became a student of American culture that I began to look at [Katherine Anne Porter] in another way," Titus said.

That other way of viewing the Southern Renaissance writer was to put her life and letters in the context of her fiction and the intense debate about changes in the gender roles of American women that took place during her lifetime. Raised by her grandmother in rural Texas, Porter "lived through a century of changes in what it meant to be a woman," Titus said. "Her writings -- stories, letters, etc -- all record this conflict she had between herself as an artist [...] and being a woman, which at that time meant raising children, and not being a public figure."

To trace Porter's ambivalent but continued interest in and examination of the relationship between art, gender and identity, Titus used Porter's unpublished works and newly available editions of her early fiction, poetry, and reviews. Titus structured the book with one of Porter's unfinished fictional stories about a young girl who is condemned to death for rebelling against her restrictive, "natural" society by inventing art and creating from it armor for herself. The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter speaks to the relationship between nature and art, and the way Porter's art protected her, damaged her, and made her a figure of both adoration and social scorn.

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Mary Titus's book, The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter, has been nominated for the Minnesota Book Award in the general nonfiction category.

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Colin Wells recently published the article, "Connecticut Wit and Augustan Theology: John Trumbull, Timothy Dwight and the New Divinity," in the journal Religion and Literature. Wells also delivered a paper, "Unmasking the American Condorcet: Enlightenment, Race and Manifest Destiny in Anti-Jeffersonian Satire" at the Northeastern American Society for 18th-Century Studies Annual Meeting in New York in October.

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Interviews with Faculty Authors

Mark Allister: Eco-Man

--Malcolm Richards, ('05), interviewer

As he immersed himself in teaching men's studies and environmental literature, English professor Mark Allister identified a gap in the two subjects; namely that men's studies did not incorporate nature and econcriticism came solely from ecofeminist positions. From this gap came Allister's inspriation for compiling and editing Econ-Man, an anthology of essays on nature and masculinity.

The anthology of essays does not maintain one unified voice, instead representing a wide range of voices and opinions. The essays range from an examination of the urban wilderness in Stephen Mexal's "Consuming Cities: Hip-Hop's Urban Wilderness and the Cult of Masculinity," to St. Olaf professor Jim Farrell's description of the nature he finds in his day-to-day existence in "The nature of My Life." Due to its diverse selection of essays, Eco-Man appeals to readers of varied interests.

Eco-Man highlights the great complexity of nature and masculinity in our society today. As Allister says in his introduction, "I believe, and the book's essays taken as a whole suggest, that the social constructions of masculinity in relation to nature are a mix of good and bad, a mix that affects individual men and women, as well as our society."

Allister's own experiences of nature exemplify the diverse ways that males experience nature in our society. As a young man, Allister went camping and backpacking, but as he's grown older his experiences of nature are more likely to come through gardening, birdwatching, or even teaching classes on environmental themes. The essays in Eco-Man have influenced Allister as well, as he occasionally finds himself incorporating aspects of the essays into his own thoughts and discussions.

 

Mark Allister: Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography

--Lacy Werner ('02), interviewer

"Writing as a way to work through grief is as old as art itself," says Mark Allister in his new book, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow. In it, he brings together several prominent nature writers who have utilized reflection of the natural world to sort through and heal their grief.

Allister began working on the book more than ten years ago as an autobiographical studies project. Through his research, however, he became interested in a group of people who have written specifically about overcoming loss with the help of the natural world. He examines the work of Terry Tempest Williams, Sue Hubbell, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Barich, William Least Heat-Moon, and Gretel Erlich.

Several of the chapters were published before the entire book was released this year. For Allister, the work was an exercise in balancing his family life with his writing and academic lives. He is grateful for a six-month sabbatical from teaching in 1998-99 to be able to rewrite the entire piece from beginning to end to make it into a more workable book form.

Judging by the increased interest in nature writing over the last several years, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow is sure to reach an audience far wider than Allister's expected group of scholars and environmental literature writers, because it discusses ways in which different types of people have-and can-find solace in the world around them.

Published by the University of Virginia Press, Refiguring the Map of Sorrow is part of the Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism series.

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Rich DuRocher: Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton's Latin Curriculum

--Sarah Varner ('03), interviewer

It is no wonder that Richard DuRocher-a professor well respected and called "cool" by many of his students-took interest in writing a book that examines Milton as a teacher. His book, Milton Among the Romans: The Pedagogy and Influence of Milton's Latin Curriculum was published last fall. The following interview took place in March over a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

We asked: What is it about Milton that makes you want to be a Milton scholar?

Rich said: On the first day of class, I always get the "why Milton" question. Milton's ideas and his language stimulate and provoke me in ways that no other writer does. It drives me to new positive insights...and it drives me crazy.

We asked: What motivated you to write Milton Among the Romans?

Rich said: Basic curiosity got me started. Any literary project begins with questions. I was most curious to see how Milton the teacher would affect Milton the poet.

We asked: How did you uncover the evidence to support your argument?

Rich said: We knew for a long time that Milton taught school. I read an account by Edward Phillips, Milton's nephew, about the details of the school. [The students of Milton's academy] read all these works of Roman science-agriculture, architecture, medicine, astronomy and earth science. At the time, I thought, 'that's really odd,' so I started reading the books, and went from there. I'm the kind of nut who likes reading old Latin science and Milton. I thought that since Milton taught this stuff and later wrote Paradise Lost, surely these subjects would come back and make an appearance.

We asked: Where does Roman architecture show up in Paradise Lost?

Rich said: Milton's famous description of Pandemonium, the devil's palace, is Roman architecture. It makes sense that the palace of Roman architecture was made for devils-Rome flourished and collapsed, not to mention the feeding of Christians to the lions. On the other hand, Milton is totally vague about what architecture is in heaven. We can guess that it probably wouldn't be Roman, though.

We asked: What was challenging about writing the book?

Rich said: I've had years of Latin, but sometimes the challenge was reading something in a technical field. For example: how to make olive oil. I wasn't sure if I was translating it right, because I'm not an expert on growing olives. As a scholar, you're always trying to be true and accurate. My work is a study of influence, and requires good judgment. On the one hand, I was always trying to prove my case, but part of me was trying to second-guess myself-to be skeptical.

We asked: Until now, no one has examined the connection between the curriculum of Milton's academy and his poetry. How is your book a new approach to Milton, and how does it feel to be pioneering the subject?

Rich said: I once gave a talk and was introduced by a scholar who said that my work is remarkable, because it is both true and new. I've kind of taken "true and new" as a silent motto. I don't think my book has a new theory or a new tool. The tools are old fashioned, people have known of Milton's use of the classics for a long time. The new part is looking and reading. Not many Milton scholars want to read hundreds and hundreds of pages of classics in search of possible connections. But I had a bizarre interest to make a connection. I often found stuff where I thought there would be the least payoff.

We asked: Are you working on any new writing projects?

Rich said: I have another book half finished already about grief, weeping and suffering in the epic tradition. It's called Tears of Odysseus, and is a more wide-ranging, psychological study. My daughter's chronic illness opened my eyes to this epic tradition.

We asked: Any last words?

Rich said: I've had so much help and support from people at St. Olaf, especially from students in my Milton classes. This kind of book can't happen without students and colleagues who are open to ideas with support all up and down the line.

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Jim Heyen: The Boys' House and Standing Naked

--Erin Benson ('02), interviewer

EB: The Boys' House struck home for me, because I grew up in North Dakota, in the Red River Valley, where farming is such a way of life. Do you see your stories as a preservation of that way of life? A celebration?

JH: Not as a preservation really. Preservations are memoirs, family histories. I'll hear a story where a woman tells about prairie fires near her farm, which were so bright she could read by the light of them. So I take that detail, and I'll turn it into fiction.

EB: I counted 65 stories in all. Where do your stories come from?

JH: Well, for instance, there was the big problem of animals being on the farm that did not belong on the farm. The adults would be very angry about this. "The Stray Cat in the Garden" takes on this notion of the intruder. The cat appeared to the boys as something dangerous, like an invader. About five days after September 11th, I had a book reading where I read this story. There's a line about "capturing a terrorist," and it was unbelievable to realize how it was part of this short story. So, in the story, of course, after the boys get closer to the cat, the cat arches its back and starts purring, and they realize that it's really harmless after all.

EB: This story is similar to your story about the farmer who drove a Studebaker instead of a Ford, "Who are Those People Anyhow?"

JH: I looked at that theme many times, this fear of the outsider, the nature of this prejudice. I looked at the dark side of it. The story of how the boys notice that these people have all kinds of different equipment, different kinds of cattle. They notice that there was something strange about them, because they didn't fit the norms of the community. Without knowing anything about them they were ready to fight them.

EB: In your story, "Who made Her Husband do all the Work," you portray the oral tradition of storytelling. Do you hope your stories will be read aloud?

JH: The people who like them the most are the people who read them aloud. The stories I love to hear are about people who keep them by their bed and read a couple of them before they go to sleep at night. There are people who take them in the car, and take them on their travels, and read a few to each other. That's where they're at they're best. But of course, when reviewers pick up the book, they read them on the page. So, it has to withstand that too. Every once in awhile, people will say, "Oh, you sound like Garrison Keillor!" I think, well, that's not bad to be compared to someone who has that kind of reputation. But if you look at Garrison Keillor's works on the page, it's different, because he really is a performance person. He has all kinds of little drifting lines on the page. When you put them on a page, you see what he does in front of a crowd, playing the crowd, which is very different than what I do on the page. I intend my words for the page first and then hope they come off the page aloud.

EB: Do you write to a specific audience, children?

JH: I write for adults. I'm always surprised when I hear they're used for kids more and more. I'm trying for a voice that's more like Chaucer's than like Milton's. Milton was my first graduate work before I started writing poetry. But my voice is much closer to the Chaucer--the clear English sentence. I guess if you write that kind of prose, it is accessible to kids. But I write for adults.

EB: I think it is because your stories are about boys. My brother is about the age of the boys in your stories, and I think they would be stories important for him to read.

JH: You know there aren't many stories for boys. If you do a search on Amazon.com, and put in "boys" + "short fiction," you're not going to find much. It's really amazing. I've been surprised in the last couple years how often at my readings there will be a woman with her boys in the audience. She's looking for something for them to read, especially for reluctant readers.

EB: One of your reviewers calls you the "Pied Piper of Farm Life in Short Fiction." What do you think of that?

JH: Anything like that, of course, you love it. Every writer deserves at least one review like this in a lifetime. That's the review everyone hopes to get.

Standing Naked

EB: Whereas The Boys' House was very much about the male experience and consciousness, your poetry is about relationships, growing up, growing old. How is writing poetry different than writing stories to you?

JH: I've written poems and stories on the very same subject. It's very strange because when it gets into fiction, it becomes something else. It's as if a different voice comes to play. And I suspect in my writing poetry, even though I think they are also very accessible, there is something more of my education in there, including the traditions of romantic love and the renaissance scholar and all of those sonnets. I think there were 200 sonnet sequences written in the 1590s, most of them were love poems, and of course, Shakespeare is there. I think part of it is the literary influence in my poems. I feel naturally part of the tradition of poetry.

The other thing about writing about relationships in Standing Naked is that the farm stories are very sensuous. It's very much a sense-oriented world of the boys. When you take that sensibility and put it into your relationships, it's just a change of your subject and not so much a change of sensibility.

EB: I really enjoyed your Iowa poem and your other poems about rural life. How does being removed from rural life affect your poems? Is it harder to write about farm life being away from it?

JH: No, it's easier. I think we need to forget it to remember it. Once you forget it, it goes into the unconscious, into the area of dreams. And then it comes back into the clutches of the immediate memory, where we're so often trying to be too honest to the facts. Now I can speak from the mythical experiences that come from the darker reaches of my imagination. So, I feel I'm freer to write about farm life.

EB: You're working on a new collection, Ordinary Sins?

JH: Right. These are all urban. Maybe that's because I've been urban long enough that that too has been forgotten so I can start calling it up and working on it as a product of the imagination. I just try to go through the ordinary neuroses-road rage, people talking on telephones in public. There's one that's probably the most popular that I've read aloud, called Sad Hour, which is about a bar where they have a sad hour and prices triple and people start coming because they want to get into the sadness of it. Little things like a guy who jingles his change, something so ordinary, odd stories like that. A little section of it has come out as a chapbook called Why Would A Woman Pour Boiling Water Over Her Head?

Ordinary Sins has been in the making for several years. I actually also have another book coming out too. I wrote the text, and they are all little vignettes for a book of photographs of Old Barns. I have a story about two barns arguing about whether they are male or female-the gender question about barns. I have one called the arrogant barn, the confused barn, the tattooed barn. That will be coming out a year from now.

EB: When did you first know you wanted to be a writer?

JH: I had this long debate when I was a little boy about whether I wanted to be a writer or a preacher. My family is made of farmers and preachers. I was good singer, a boy soprano. I sang for all the weddings and funerals, and I liked the stage. So I thought preaching would be my place. Then I thought about being a writer, though I continued to think about preaching as late as college. It was because I realized it was literature that I really loved, though I thought that I would never write anything commercial. So I thought of myself primarily as a teacher. But I broke away from teaching pretty early, to do nothing but live the life of a writer, during the shuffle years, as I call them. After doing that for many years and I had the chance to teach here, I found that I'm doing as much writing as I teach as I did when I wasn't teaching.

EB: Do your classes inspire you?

JH: Some of them do. There are several poems in Standing Naked that I wrote in classes.

EB: Do you have any advice for students who are aspiring writers?

JH: I think because today students see such an urgency in making a living right after college. Well, we really didn't have that. If someone wanted to write in the early sixties, we could do this sideline job and rent an apartment for twenty-five or thirty dollars a month. Maybe you'd have a job that paid two dollars an hour, but you really could do it. That's just not a possibility today. So I think the options are much different now. I think anyone who wants to be a writer has to really love the writing enough that they know they can keep it going while they make a living.

The quality that I think guarantees a writer success more than just raw talent is dogged persistence. Not giving up. Of all of the people that I knew in my twenties and thirties, those that are considered successful writers today weren't the most talented ones say when I was 21 or 22. The most successful writers are the ones who are persistent. Maybe even not as doggedly, maybe even not as aggressively, but more casually, not putting too much urgency in it. That's why I worry about some young writers who feel such an urgency to make it as a writer really young. I don't think urgency gives them their best work. They have to work out some agreement with themselves, maybe a lifestyle that will allow writing to flourish while still providing sustenance. I advise marry rich.

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Joseph Mbele: Matengo Folktales

--Lyndsay LeClair ('03), interviewer

In 1999 Associate Professor of English Joseph Mbele published his most recent book, Matengo Folktales, after 23 years of field research, scrupulous translating, and writing commentaries. The book, which contains ten folktales translated from Mbele's mother tongue of Matengo into English, represents the culmination of the professor's life-long project and passion.

Mbele, a widely-known and respected folklorist, began his research on Matengo Folktales during the summer of 1975 while pursuing his undergraduate degree at Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. He was first introduced to the folklore field by a professor from Lesotho, South Africa, who joined the university during Mbele's time there. "Through taking his course I discovered that I connected with folklore naturally. My own father was a great storyteller and storytelling was a very important part of my childhood. I was inspired in the field and never turned back."

During the summers of 1975 and 1976, Mbele recorded folktales from area storytellers near his home in southern Tanzania, including three folktales from his father. After taking detailed field notes and recording each folktale on cassette tapes, he began the long process of translating the folktales from Matengo, an oral language, into written English. In 1999 after 23 years of translating and writing accompanying commentary, Matengo Folktales was published.

The translation process interests and frustrates Mbele, who explains that completely accurate translations are "an impossible dream." He says, "In certain ways I feel that oral languages are richer than written languages, and to say we have translated accurately is to deceive ourselves. Compromises must be made."One of Mbele's goals for the book was to make it accessible not only for academic readers but for all people. Mbele says, "My father was a great conversationalist. He connected with everyone without distinction. I wanted this book to do the same."

Matengo Folktales can be purchased from the St. Olaf College Bookstore. A complete listing of Professor Mbele's work and praise for Matengo Folktales can be found at: http://www.stolaf.edu/people/mbele/

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Colin Wells: The Devil and Doctor Dwight: Satire and Theology in the Early American Republic

--Elizabeth Lund ('02), interviewer

EL: What inspired you to write this book?

Colin Wells: My inspiration was Dwight's 778-line satiric poem "The Triumph of Infidelity," which I read in graduate school for the first time. What struck me immediately was how apparently incomprehensible it was, which led me to try to "crack its code"--the unspoken assumptions that made it make sense to a number of people in 1788. Once I was able to do that, I realized both that virtually no one had gotten the poem right before, and that the larger story of its significance would take a book-length project to explain.

EL: What other work have you done with Early American satire?

Colin Wells: This is a long-time interest, but most of that time has been spent writing about Timothy Dwight and his fellow Federalist Wits--poets who waged satiric warfare against Jeffersonian Democracy in the early years of the republic (such poets as John Trumbull, David Humphreys, Richard Alsop, Lemuel Hopkins and Dwight's brother, Theodore).

(Students: don't worry if you've never heard of these writers; not many people have, but I'm hoping that someday they will.)

EL: What did you hope to accomplish in your writing? Do you feel that you have accomplished that?

Colin Wells: I wanted, first, to recover for a modern audience the literary, religious, political and ideological significance of Timothy Dwight's campaign of satire and controversial writing at the end of the eighteenth-century. In addition, I wanted to make "The Triumph of Infidelity" "readable" again for teachers and students alike. (As an appendix to the book, I include the full text of Dwight's poem.) Whether I've succeeded or not I'll leave to my readers....

EL: How did you go about finding a publisher?

Colin Wells: While still working on the book, I applied for a fellowship from the Institute for Early American History and Culture in Williamsburg, VA, to complete the manuscript. I didn't get the fellowship, but the publications editor at the Institute wrote to say she was very interested in it, and asked me to submit it when finished. I did, and they accepted it (with further revisions, of course).

EL: Have you been happy with the response so far?

Colin Wells: Extremely: the only responses I've seen are by those who provided the blurbs for the cover, but I was struck by how these descriptions of the book matched my own sense of what I was trying to accomplish.

EL: Which part is your favorite? Which part was the most fun to write?

Colin Wells: There are particular passages, particular paragraphs that I reread proudly and remember the moment I wrote them for the first time. But I can't call it fun; as the saying goes, I hate writing, I love having written.

EL: Did your opinion of Dr. Dwight and his work change over the course of writing the book?

Colin Wells: What surprises me is how Timothy Dwight--a figure whom other historians and critics have sometimes viewed unfavorably--appears to me as a better writer and a smarter social critic than when I started. He really is an unappreciated but fine satirist, and judging from the advance quotes, people are starting to recognize that.

EL: How do you balance academic work with teaching? Are there any ways in which they conflict?

Colin Wells: My own work on seldom-taught writers and their worlds is sometimes difficult to make fit with my courses. I've rarely taught Dwight in my courses, though much of what I write about in the book is Dwight's allusions to Pope, Swift, Dryden and other famous figures. However, now that I've made the text of "The Triumph" available (with notes), I will try to teach it. I feel that part of what I'm supposed to offer as a teacher is my particular expertise, whatever that may be. As the world's expert on this poem, I should make that knowledge available. So students, beware!

EL: Do you have any plans for future projects?

Colin Wells: My next book is a larger and wider look at satiric poetry in the Early Republic. Poets and satirists in the 1780s, 90s, and 1800s were engaged almost daily with the political issues of the times, and there is a fascinating story to tell about the "poetry wars" they waged against politicians and each other in the name of shaping America's future. On my sabbatical, then, I've been engaged in a systematic process of reading every political poem written in this period (including poems published in newspapers). I've completed the 1790s, and the list of poems already tops 300. I've got about 25 or 30 more years to do, so look for me at the microfilm machine for the next year or so.

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Mary Winstead: Back to Mississippi

--Katie Moore ('03), interviewer

Five years ago, when English department faculty member Mary Winstead began researching a book to record her father's Mississippi folk tales, she uncovered much more than she could have imagined. She discovered, in the words of Jim Heynen, "painful truths of the people she loved and thought she knew."

Back to Mississippi is simultaneously an autobiographical story of childhood and a look at three civil rights activists struggling to change the ignorance and hatred of America towards African Americans. Winstead beautifully weaves the two stories together, eventually revealing the shocking murder of the three activists during the "freedom summer of 1964." Even more shocking, she learns and reveals that the murder was assisted by a distant relation. She presents her story from three perspectives: herself as a child and adolescent growing up in Minnesota, and finally as an adult returning to Mississippi to uncover the secret¹s of her family¹s past.

Somehow, Winstead manages to present a painfully honest look at the underlying racial prejudices of her family and society while retaining the humor that only childhood and family life can bring. Whether racism is overtly expressed or is a silent lesson taught to children through the actions of their parents, she encounters it in Mississippi and Minnesota alike. Yet, despite meeting the anger and pain of family members since the release of her book, she still believes the power of overcoming racism lies within the individual.

Back to Mississippi is currently available in the St. Olaf Bookstore.