League of Minnesota Poets: Thawlight

The 2026 conference of the Minnesota League of Poets took place in Ely, Minnesota on April 10 & 11.  The theme is "Thawlight," a word invented by poet Amanda Bailey to signify the change from the winter cold that put our animals in hibernation and our trees on hold. The season is turning toward spring with melting of ice and snow, greening of fields, leaves emerging on the trees, and songbirds returning. It's like dawn, she said. A creative time.  

I hope my keynote address inspires poets to think of ways to tap into the power of changes, like the way a polliwog transforms into a frog or an egg hatches and the bird starts to fly.  I want to acknowledge and borrow the forces of change, the elements, and the mythic stories, folk tales, fairy tales, and creation stories. I want all of our imagination and music to flourish, I want poets to change the world. 

Usual and Impossible

 

TIME’S BODY by Brenda Hillman

—in the middle of the beginning they woke you
from a long sleep;

you could see the edges of the world
being formed, the boundaries
space would make in its eagerness
to be included.

The problem time would have
in its need to be the main thing.

The source of life is not life
but rebellion toward meaning.
When you saw the workers were already busy,

that the list you’d been handed
was usual and impossible

And held it all, and thin
or most, your will
strong as a paper clip

you needed a location
from which to act on your assigned nature

so you chose time:
seed of light,
seed of torment—

About poetry, Hillman writes: 

It is impossible to put boundaries on your words, even if you make a poem. Each word is a maze. So, you are full of desire to make a memorable thing and have the form be very dictated by some way that it has to be. But the poem itself is going to undo that intention. It’s almost like you’re knitting a sweater and something is unraveling it on the other end. – Brenda Hillman

Inspirations: Composing Myself

I write about rivers. My work reflects my landscape, but I would not call my work "nature writing." Instead I am taken by the forces in the landscape, and I find that these propel my poetry. 

This video featuring Anna Thorvaldsdottir, composer, expresses the same impulse. She says this about her inspiration: "sometimes it's the balances and the structural forces and the opposites in nature...."

 

I found a wonderful recording: the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra performing "Before We Fall," a new composition from Ann Thorvaldsdottir. Amazing.  It's just the kind of music I love to listen to while writing.... centered on the cello (it was created for the cellist Johannes Moser), instrumental, and rich with texture and nuances. The Minnesota Orchestra will perform this piece in January 2027. I'm definitely going to be there.

The link below is a video of the performance of "Before We Fall" that premiered at Musikkitalo in Helsinki, Finland. You will glimpse the twisted shape of the organ pipes in this video -- they look like a tangle of branches from a large tree. The organ is not played, but the image of silvery tree limbs speaks of Nordic landscapes.  

Before We Fall:   

https://vimeo.com/1156421110

This feature video of Thorvaldsdottir is available through the Wise Music Group, representing composers and songwriters across the globe.  See more at https://www.youtube.com/@WiseMusicGroup

Ecstatic Poems: Laugh Even When You Lose

Loss is Not Defeat

Poet Coleman Barks passed away recently.  At the University of Georgia English Department, he used to teach literature and creative writing.  A writer of ecstatic poems, he also translated the Sufi poet, Rumi.  The word ecstatic comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning “to stand outside of oneself.” It is poetry that expresses transcendence or mystical experience.  This was characteristic of the poems written by Barks, as in this excerpt of his poem "Glad."  

In the glory of the gloaming-green soccer
field her team, the Gladiators, is losing

ten to zip. She never loses interest in
the roughhouse one-on-one that comes

every half a minute. She sticks her leg
in danger and comes out the other side running.

...

This poem reflects joy in losing as well as in winning. To read the entire poem by Coleman Barks, go to 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coleman-barks#tab-poems

Read an excerpt of a  poem by Rumi: 

Your laughter turns the world to paradise.
It tears through me like fire.
It teaches me.
...

Last night, the spirit of dawn came to my room
and gave me a lesson in laughter.
Our blazing roars lit the morning sky.

When I brood like a rain cloud,
laughter flashes through me.
It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.

Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold—laughing in fire, daring you,

“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”
...

From Gold (NYRB Classics, 2022) by Rumi. Translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori. Copyright © 2022 by Haleh Liza Gafori. 

To read the entire poem and see a lesson plan for teaching this, go to 

poets.org

To read a poem by Coleman Barks, go to 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/coleman-barks#tab-poems

Seared by Memory: Meet the Moment: Writers Speak Out on Feb 26, 2026 at Wussow's Concert Cafe in Duluth, Minnesota

In the Blaney lecture“Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness” on October 25, 2013, at Poets Forum in New York City. (and archived on Poets.org) Carolyn Forché said,:

I know that poetry begins in a not-knowing rather than a moral impulse. A poet’s consciousness is, in this sense, improvisational and open to transformations, felicitous accidents, and an intuitive response to language-generating meaning and music—that is true whether the spark igniting the poem comes from a word, a phrase, an image, or a moment in experience, present or remembered....

I also know that consciousness can be incised by experience, seared by memory, awakened by what is seen and lived and that the poet’s language also passes through this fire and is marked by it."

I had the pleasure of hosting this event. Thank you to the writers of these great poems & prose featured last week at Meet the Moment. Carter Meland Julie Gard Sara Sowers-Wills Jess Morgan, Anastasia Bamford Ryan Vine Jayson Iwen Liz Minette, Troy Peters, Haley Swann, Patty Fleege, Lexi Clark, Sarah Royer-Stoll, and Claudia Daly. Wussow's Concert Cafe, Zomi Bloom

Here's a sample of songs created in resistance to ICE.

Singing Resistance this winter in Minneapolis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4qXXNnjGHQ

The Streets of Minneapolis: Three Irish Women

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ci_0PAObc4A&list=RDCi_0PAObc4A

The Rise of the North

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uozLlmUhzZY

F**k ICE by Scared Ketchup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PUOhAJG5EU&list=RD4PUOhAJG5EU

Meet the Moment: Writers Speak Out in Duluth, Minnesota

The Libraries in Helsinki

Spending time in Helsinki....

Rikhardinkadun Kirjasto

Kansalliskirjasto

Kansalliskirjasto

Oodi
 

The UpNorth LitFest in Fosston, Minnesota September 25-26

 Come to the UpNorth LitFest In Fosston, Minnesota at the end of September for these writers workshops and a great community of people who love art and literature.

Register here: https://auroracenterforthearts.org/events/upnorth-litfest

On An Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes

I'm so happy to have some of my writing in this upcoming book! 

On An Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes 

edited by Michael Welch

Available for pre-order:  $20.00 

from https://beltpublishing.com/products/on-an-inland-sea

The thirty-two writers in this collection grapple with the vastness of the lakes and the vastness of the experience living alongside them. Gabriel Bump explores how his relationship with Lake Michigan changed after losing a friend. For another writer, the water provided an opportunity to explore a romance that would have been too complicated on land. Come dive for shipwrecks, harvest manoomin, and visit the disappearing ice caves. Witness the chickadees, smelt, and cattails, but also zebra mussels, factory runoff, and algae. Each writer's relationship with the lake is personal and unique, but that relationship to the water is also one shared by so many of us.   

Michael Welch is editor in chief of the Chicago Review of Books. His work was named the winner of the 2024 Salamander Magazine Fiction Prize among other awards and has appeared in Electric Lit, Los Angeles Review of Books, Scientific American, Prairie Schooner, North American Review, and elsewhere. He received his MA in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. 

Anthology: 6 x 9

This book will be released March 10, 2026.

Writing in the Bog

 

Saturday, August 16, 2025

Writing In the Bog Workshop

Workshop facilitated by Sheila Packa

10:00 am- 3:00 pm Meeting in the Lois King Education Center at the Zim Sax Bog, 8793 Owl Avenue, Toivola, MN 55765 (see directions below). 

Course Fee: $60/non-members (includes a FOSZB membership); $40/FOSZB members and Minnesota Master Naturalists

Activity Rating: 1

Join writer Sheila Packa for this eco-writing workshop at the Sax-Zim Bog. This will be a workshop for writers interested in crafting stories or poems with a strong ecological or environmental emphasis. The bog is a useful metaphor for the creative process, whether you are a beginner or an experienced writer. Sometimes it’s a slog. We have difficulty finding our way. The bog helps us to slow down, and at some point, cross a threshold into a creative flow. The sense of time is altered. We hope you will join us!

This generative workshop will begin with writing about the landscape. It might be the bog or perhaps another place that has marked you. Barry Lopez thought the external landscape greatly affects our psyche, or internal landscape. He says the internal landscape develops as we grow up in or live within a particular place, and our life reflects that its contours and relationships.  Using a variety of guided writing exercises, participants will have time to brainstorm, do a few writing exercises, and have discussion. As your story emerges, we will look at how to let it grow organically. Last, we will review  quick editing tips. At the end of the day, those that would like to share excerpts of their work will have an opportunity to do so.

There is no better time that now to write about landscape and the environment. Whatever you write will make it stronger! 

Sheila Packa, formerly Duluth’s Poet Laureate. All four of her immigrant grandparents settled in Zim, Sax, Toivola, and Forbes in the early 1900s. Her recent books, Night Train Red Dust: Poems of the Iron Range and Surface Displacements. She edited “Migrations,” an anthology of 75 Lake Superior area writers writing about change and transitions. All of these books explore the histories and landscape of northern Minnesota. Sheila has taught Composition and Creative Writing at Lake Superior College and in the community. To learn more about Sheila and her works/style check out her website: https://sheilapacka.com/

Registration is now open!

Head over to our website to register: Writing in the Sax-Zim Bog

or

https://secure.lglforms.com/form_engine/s/n-Knzf_3qFtyb7Gaq6St2g

Map: https://saxzim.org/plan-your-visit/#wcdirections