Emily Brisse

I'm happy to share that my essay "This Is My Oldest Story" has been published by  Creative Nonfiction's True Story . The title doesn't say it all, but it says a lot. With these words, I finally found a way to write about something I've been trying to process since I was eight: the abduction and decades-long disappearance of Jacob Wetterling , a neighbor boy from my hometown. Even though--as I discuss in the essay--I still have reservations regarding writing about Jacob publicly, I had another conversation with another stranger just yesterday that echoed much of what I explore in this piece: how for Minnesotans, there was "a time before Jacob Wetterling's kidnapping and a time after it," how the entire region was affected by this boy's loss. Sitting with these memories now still reduces me to fear and anger and heart ache. Which is why I wrote about them. Which is why I think we all do better when we leave the solitary shadows. By tellin...

You were never much of a hunter. Pheasants, yes. Squirrels and chipmunks, I suppose, when you were younger. But you never came home from a weekend away with a buck in the bed of your truck, because you never had much interest in deer season opener and you owned a sedan. I imagine some people from other places can hardly conceive of a Midwestern man without a shotgun over his mantle, a closet full of blaze-orange jackets, a copy of  Field and Stream  next to the john. And yet when I think of you, I do see an outdoorsman. I see you paying attention to landscapes, to the clouds. I see you teaching me to love the world. ***  The remainder and revised version of this essay will appear in Literary Mama's summer 2014 edition.  Click on over to read the rest.

The thick nouns of our winter cold are soon To disappear like shifting, soft vapor, Like morning fog that clings as close as loons To lake tops warmer than the April air. When up it lifts, the skies erupt in blue Announcing with the earth that spring has sprung. Warm breezes! Rain! Round, cotton clouds and dew! These greens! Such oxygen is gold for lungs. As Northerners, we rush outdoors to sing, To revel in the sun our skin has missed We happily observe the birds trav'ling, Bright promises enclosed in their twig fists.      And just as we put back mittens and hats,      We wake to white—more snow—yes, just like that. -- by moi Originally written for my students after a lively sonnet lesson. Originally published in The Saint Cloud Times  April 2008 Spring Poetry feature.

"I used to come out on winter nights, when the sky was heavy with stars. The shadowy trees, dignified and knowledgeable, seemed as much a part of the heavens as of earth, and I'd get the feeling that it wouldn't take much of anything to step into the blackness of the sky, that there wasn't any magic to becoming a part of it." -- From A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton

A man after my own heart, this  Charlie Baxter . The Minnesota native was only twenty seconds into his Friday night reading at Micawbers Bookstore when he addressed his Midwesternness, a label that is regularly affixed to his award-winning work. "Just the other day I received an email from a reader in Los Angeles," Baxter said, "and the man's main question was--if you've published nine books, why are you still living in Minnesota ?" Why, indeed? What is there possibly to love or find interesting or important or certainly literary in our flyover state? And yet there we were, sixty or so Minneapolis-St. Paul people, shoulder-to-shoulder in a small colorful bookstore, colorful hats and scarves thrown over the backs of chairs, snow melting on our boots, gathered together to hear a writer read. It felt about as important as anything else could be. Baxter's newest book is  Gryphon , a highly praised collection of published, anthologized, and new stories th...

It seems that when I went into my master's program, I adopted a kind of tunnel vision and took in only art news that was of the adult literary variety, because just like I was caught blinking two years ago at  The Hunger Games ' unveiling, so too am I finding my jaw dropping two years after the hype at the music of Bon Iver . "Flume" or "Re: Stacks" starts to play, and--just like I did in high school--I find myself on the floor of my bedroom, eyes closed, listening, forming my lips around lyrics I want to swallow up and make a part of me. It is November now, but still I will roll down my car windows for this. Such music is like wind; it runs well through the trees, these empty fields, into the lungs of the coming winter. 

Hello Bill. When I mention your name in Minnesota, there are always some folks who start to cry. And it's not because you poked fun at their habits or told the truth (often the same thing). It's because they loved you . They loved your writing, yes, but they also loved you. Who you were. As I've held your books this past year, I've turned to your picture on jacket covers and book backs, and it seems there was always a mass of hair, a deep beard, warm sweaters. Just from this, I think, had I known you I would have loved you, too. But I didn't know you, so I must send these little claps to where they will flitter through the  grasses and occasional treetops around both Minneota, Minnesota, and Iceland, two places you loved specifically and with tender detail, two places that felt the force of your intuitive pen.  When I went to my bookshelf of college texts and took from it  The Music of Failure , I had memories of my own grumblings, of immature reluctance and bore...

Hello, Paul. I've been wanting to sit down and talk with you for some time now. I opened up Worlds Within a World  last summer, and then Travels in Canoe Country,  and then Journal of a Prairie Year  and  Grass Roots. When I began The Necessity of Empty Places  I already knew I'd agree with you, even though I'd find myself continually surprised by what you had to say. So it goes with kindred souls. And I don't think you'd mind that I claim that. Other people and other places can tell your story better than me, so I'll let them. But I think it's important that I point a few other thinkers to your message. We are all so busy. It's good, before the leaves change this Autumn, to remind ourselves to slow down. "I accept, when I am in the woods, the idea that I do not completely command my life. To venture into a wilderness is to submit to the authority of nature. This may also seem a regression — adults command, children submit — but it is actually ...

Midwestern lore has it that when the goldenrod blooms, it's time to return to school. Well, the fields are a-full of these plants, friends, so for me it's back to teaching. I do still hope to post at least once a week. We'll see.  A special thanks to all of you who have read along and commented this summer—whether online or in person. Writing is a solitary art; when I compose these words, it really is just me and the swallows twittering outside my window. So it's likely that whatever you've said to me about my crazy blog-world-endeavor, I remember it. When I doubt whether to press publish —because writing has always felt so private and personal—I think of your kind eyes on some other end of these internets, and I'm heartened. You have made sharing easier for me, and I guess the whole point of this post is just to say thanks.  You’re a good bunch. Be well, and enjoy your patch of home.

. As evidenced by many of the poems collected in Silence in the Snowy Fields ( 1962), Robert Bly looked toward the landscapes of Minnesota and often saw: Cornfields, cornstalks Catholic churches Box-elder trees, box-elder bugs Prairie grasses Chickens' eyes Dust Barns Norwegian immigrants Alfalfa fields Crickets Turkey sheds Telephone poles Corn stubble Perhaps not the most romantic list. And yet, the verses he called "Love Poem" go like this:       "When we are in love, we love the grass,      And the barns, and the light poles,      And the small mainstreets abandoned all night."  And to me, this seems exactly, simply, accurate . When we love — whether a person or a place — there is possibility for beauty in everything.