A great week to meet Minnesota writers, including J. Ryan Stradal

Mary Ann Grossmann, Pioneer Press
·10 min read
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What a week for meeting Minnesota-related authors. We can hear Ryan Stradal introduce his new novel and listen to fiction featuring magic by Kat Howard as well as Anne Burt’s story of a family with secrets born in Bosnia. And there’s a new partnership between poet Danny Klecko and jazz pianist Chuck Solberg. Something for everyone. (Except for Stradal’s program these events are free and open to the public.)

“Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club”: by J. Ryan Stradal (Pamela Dorman Books, $27). 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 25, in conversation with Lorna Landvik; Hook and Ladder Theater, 3010 Minnehaha Ave, Mpls., presented by Literature Lovers’ Night Out. $15 in advance, $20 at the door. Tickets at thehookmpls.com.

Depending on how you looked at it, the writing was on the wall for places like the Lakeside anyway. On Florence’s drives to and from Bear Jaw, it seems like the Cities were getting a little closer every year. Florence had noticed how towns she thought were too small to have a Country Kitchen or a Jorby’s or a Pizza Hut now had these places. There was no such kind of restaurant in Bear Jaw yet, but one day soon there would be.

First you might have a cocktail. Then the waitress brings the relish tray, a restaurant innovation that began in Wisconsin. Then came the walleye or a prime rib platter so huge it was “less like a meal and more like a friendly opponent,” Ryan Stradal writes, describing what people ate at the fictional Lakeside Supper Club on Lake Bear Jaw in northern Minnesota.

In his tender-hearted third novel (after “Kitchens of the Great Midwest” and “The Lager Queen of Minnesota”), Minnesota native Stradal does what he does so well — write about women. “Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club” is more complicated than his previous novels because it involves four generations of women in one family and their men. The novel was a Best Books pick by People magazine and earned a starred review from Kirkus.

The narrative toggles between characters from the 1930s to the present, showing each woman’s relationship to the supper club, a unique type of restaurant once popular in the Upper Midwest as places for celebrations. This is a story as much about changing times in rural Minnesota as it is about family.

It begins in the 1930s, when Betty and her young daughter Florence are homeless. Betty believes they will be OK and they are, when they get a ride that takes them to Bear Jaw. Betty eventually owns the Lakeside but Florence wants nothing to do with it after working there most of her teen years.

In the 1980s the story is about Florence’s daughter Mariel, who grows up at Bear Jaw and inherits the club. She’s married to good-natured Ned, who also comes from a restaurant family. His father sees the future and builds an empire of chain eateries that will eventually end the tradition of supper clubs like the Lakeside. When there is a tragedy in their family, Mariel is convinced the supper club is her destiny and fights to make it the best.

Concluding in the present, the story focuses on Mariel and Ned’s daughter Julia, who inherits the supper club that is now past its prime.

Everywhere in the novel Stradal, who grew up in Hastings, shows his fondness for our region. He explains why the massive Sunday prime rib specials at the Lakeside began during the Great Depression: “Back then, Floyd saw the anxious faces on his customers, and saw people who’d saved up to have a special dinner for a birthday or anniversary. He felt that it’d be comforting for them to see so much food in one place, and wanted to let these folks know that everything was going to be okay.”

Stradal also loves low-key humor. For instance, Mariel and her mother Florence don’t get along and when Mariel refuses to pick up her mother from church, Florence doesn’t accept offers from friends to take her home. Instead, she moves into the church where she is visited by her buddies from town who play games with her and bring food. All of Bear Jaw wonders how long this mother-daughter standoff will continue.

Stradal’s characters are clearly drawn, from rebellious Florence to hard-working Mariel and college-educated Julia. The men are equally individuals, from patient Ned to two closeted gay guys who teach Florence to play cribbage. And his dialogue is so good it sounds like our own families.

As with Stradal’s previous novels, these folks will find their way into your heart.

“A Sleight of Shadows”: by Kat Howard (Saga Press, $26.99). 6 p.m. Tuesday, April 25, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

The House of Shadows sits on bones. All of the sacrifices, all of the magicians who die in Shadows, they’re buried beneath the foundations. Bones hold magic.

Kat Howard, who lives in St. Paul, continues the story of Sydney, one of the world’s most dangerous magicians, in this sequel to “The Unkindness of Magicians,” first in the Unseen World series and winner of an American Library Association Alex award for books that have special appeal to readers 12 to 18. It is one of the most anticipated books for lovers of the magic realms genre.

The Unseen World exists in the midst of glitzy New York, but only magicians can see it. This congregation of great Houses goes back generations and exists because each family gives its firstborn to the House of Shadows. Every so often the Turning, a competition between magicians, rearranges the Houses based on who wins. Sydney was one of those children given to the Shadows but escaped at the cost of giving up her shadow — and her magic.

As the new book begins, something is wrong in the Unseen World. The Houses are falling apart, vines creeping under the doors and cracks appearing everywhere. Is it because the House of Shadows was destroyed by Sydney?

In Central Park, again hidden from mortal view, is a park where each tree is centered on a bone, and the flowers are made of bone. Bones also anchor owners to their Houses. Sydney knows bones are the foundation of the House of Shadows, which she wants to end — again — aided by her friends Harper and Madison who were introduced in the first book.

But some inhabitants of the Unseen World want the House of Shadows to stand, including a magician who is recruiting a young, eager magician wannabe to live alone in the evil House as it begins rebuilding itself and recovering its magic. Sydney must get her magic back and learn to weave the most sophisticated spells as she meets deadly challenges.

But will destroying the House of Shadows also destroy the Unseen World?

Howard, who writes fantasy, science fiction and horror, is a University of Minnesota graduate. Her short fiction is in her collection “A Cathedral of Myth and Bone.” She is the author of the critically acclaimed “Roses and Rot” and one of the writers of the Books of Magic series, set in the Sandman Universe.

“The Dig”: by Anne Burt (Counterpoint, $27).6 p.m. Wednesday, April 26, Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul.

But it was Paul’s searches I returned to most of all — stories and stories about the Balkans. The war after Yugoslavia dissolved. The Serbian conquest of Bosnia, and later of Kosovo. The United Nations declaration of the war against the Bosniak people — my people.

In 1993 two children huddle under a bed in Sarajevo as their apartment building is bombed. Three-year-old Antonia and her 6-year-old brother, Paul, can see from their vantage point only their dead mother’s wrist and hand. The children are rescued by Minnesota brothers Christopher and Eddie King. Eddie was to be their father, but they learn he is dead and Christopher and his wife raise the orphans in the little town of Thebes in rural Minnesota.

Now, it’s 2014 and Toni is the new junior associate in a high-powered Minneapolis law firm. She’s been called home to Thebes by her powerful uncle Christopher to deal with a family emergency having to do with The Big Dig, a project dear to developer Christopher’s heart involving building a mall. But to finalize his dream, Christopher has to demolish the building that is the heart of the local Somali community. Paul, sympathetic to the Somalis, has disowned his family and left the home, living with his new friends. When a fight breaks out at the construction site, Paul disappears and Toni feels betrayed. She felt safe with her brother, the only one who could tell her over and over his few memories of their parents.

There’s a lot going on in this debut novel of family, ethnicity and the legal world where ethics can get slippery. Christopher is angry at Toni for taking a job in Minneapolis instead of joining the family’s construction company. She’s fending off her mentor at the law firm, who wants hourly reports on Toni’s investigation into their most important client’s indiscreet behavior. Mostly, she wants to track her brother.

In one day Toni learns secrets that will change her life, including what happened to Eddie, the lengths to which her ruthless uncle will go to get his way, and how her mother died. Secondary characters include Toni’s Aunt Evelyn, a quiet but important force in the young woman’s life, as well as her pretty younger cousin, who wants to become a fashion influencer, and her gay cousin, her protector on the playground when the blond, blue-eyed Thebes kids mocked her for her dark hair and eyes.

Burt (not to be confused with the mayor of Woodbury with the same name), lives in New York but she nails life in rural Minnesota, from the hostility to newcomers to Aunt Evelyn’s ideas about how a girl properly conducts herself — ideas Toni ignores as a teen.

“The Dig” is the March American Booksellers Association’s IndieNext pick and the Women’s History Recommended Read by the Jewish Book Council. Burt is the editor of “My Father Married Your Mother: Dispatches from the Blended Family” and co-editor with Christina Baker Kline of “About Face: Women Write About What They See When They Look in the Mirror.” Her essays and fiction have appeared in national literary publications.

“Zelda’s Bed”: by Klecko (Paris Morning Publications, $17) -5:30 p.m. Friday, April 28, Grand Hand Gallery, 819 Grand Ave., St. Paul.

Amidst the silence/Amidst the calm/I began to notice certain energy/Occupied this space/I felt the energy was familiar/But I couldn’t put my finger on it./What was it/I tried to move on…

The blues were born in the South, and so was Zelda Fitzgerald, so it’s natural that they come together when Danny Klecko launches his new book, “Zelda’s Bed,”‘ with piano accompaniment by blues/jazz pianist Chuck Solberg.

Klecko, a poet and baker who loves St. Paul, introduced his new book in March at Zelda Fitzgerald Week in Asheville, N.C., which commemorated the 75th anniversary of the death of Scott Fitzgerald’s wife in a fire in an Asheville mental institution

“Zelda’s Bed” is based partly on Klecko’s visit last year to Zelda’s birthplace, Montgomery, Ala., where he stayed in her elegantly restored bedroom in the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum and Airbnb. It is the second in his trilogy about St. Paul-born Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda. The first was “The Dead Fitzgeralds.”

Devotees of jazz and blues are in for a treat when Solberg is at the keyboard in this first partnership between him and Klecko.

“I’m kind of nervous,” says the usually self-confident Klecko “As a writer I’ve never had to perform up to Chuck’s high standard as a musician.”

A former player with his brother’s James Solberg Band, Chuck is now owner of his own band. By the time Chuck was 15 he was playing in Chicago jazz clubs. In the 1960s and early ’70s he played with jazz/blues legends such as Luther Allison, for whom James was a sideman.

When the Solberg boys were young the family lived briefly in Hibbing, across the street from the Zimmermans, and the brothers played marbles with Bob Zimmerman, now Bob Dylan.

Solberg is also a nationally known potter whose work is in museum permanent collections around the country. His pottery has been displayed at the Grand Hand Gallery so he will be right at home when he and Klecko honor Zelda Fitzgerald, the Golden Girl of the Jazz Age.

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