Birchbark Blog

Chi Miigwech -- Big Thank You

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 16:09:00 GMT

Dear Store Supporters,

A huge thank you to all of you. When we sent out invitations to come to a benefit for the bookstore, replies flooded in. Some of you donated even though you could not attend the festive event--just smacking a check on the counter and leaving Susan with a tear in her pretty brown eye. Many, many of you made a point of buying stacks of books. The response was so sudden that I got a call from our ever-courageous bookkeeper Diane. She had been about to do the usual grueling little dance -- decide which bills to pay, which bills to beg off -- when she looked at our account. Double take! What happiness!

I'd like to publish an online list of Friends of Birchbark Books, names only, if there is no objection. If anybody doesn't want their name on the list, please raise hand. I have sent out mail and email thank yous, a few have come back -- so those of you who weren't personally thanked by me please receive my warmest thanks. Your generosity startled me, and moved me. After over ten years of running the bookstore it feels good, no, it feels terrific, to know we aren't alone!

A personal word regarding our new next door neighbor, Don Saunders of In Season. First the food. Don thinks like an artist about his menus, but is one of those rare unpretentious chefs. Please try his restaurant In Season -- it is lively, has wild wall art, and is friendly place. The food is based on utterly fresh local ingredients and prepared by a Minnesotan with a touch of genius.

Okay, but plenty of people were hoping for something like the Kenwood Cafe, and are worried about an upscale joint upscaling a beloved location where people could hang out. But the special forces that aligned to make the Kenwood Cafe cannot be duplicated. And I think we have a winner moving in next door. The Kenwood (or whatever it will be called) will be an all day place, with breakfasts, brunch-lunch, snack time, and then grown up dinner time. And Don is sensitive about not pricing the food out of reach. The other day I met him as he came around to gather mail. What he said should reassure and excite everybody.

A local resident had visited In Season and said if Don served breakfast he would be there every day. Don's face lighted up and then went a little dreamy. He said, "I'd like to make that man the best pancake he's ever tasted."

That pancake dangles at the end of the next few dark months of construction like a fluffy golden little sun . . .

Please come visit us and enjoy Susan's Amazing Morning Coffee. I am now hooked and have a cup at my elbow at this very moment.

So long, book lovers, and Thank You again

Louise

Romantic Getaway

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:47:00 GMT

Yes, the intimate and eclectric, intellectually challenging, emotionally limitless small independent bookstore is the new and favorite romantic getaway! We also provide a sort of single's club service -- compatible strangers easily meet when contemplating the same book. Conversation starts so naturally. And what is more pleasurable than browsing through books with a beloved friend or partner, opening the book, pointing out a passage, comparing favorites? Each to his or her own, I say, regarding electronic reading devices, but two people reading real books together is romantic. Two people gazing at their devices together, unable to lick the pages, is just sad.

I just read Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald -- romantic. Dune and Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert -- romantic for the old school geek. 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami -- romantic for any sort of geek. A Farewell to Arms, Wuthering Heights, Portrait of a Lady -- romantically filled with deception and loss. My friend Keith's top ten romantic novels are: Clarissa, by Samuel Richardson. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. The Lover by Marguerite Duras.

Calling for more romantic (literary) nominations -- especially in the contemporary and Native books category -- I am hoping that some of you will respond --

Free chocolates at Birchbark Books during Valentine's Day week, and a table of romantic books to share.

Hearts,

Louise

100 Per Cent Friends

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 04:15:00 GMT

Dear Friends,

I remember the ravishing day that we opened the new door between our little bookstore and Kenwood Cafe. Since that day, we have had a true partnership. I'd like to thank Catherine and Jeff for cooking special theme meals for our book club, for lending their hearts to causes and showing movies like H2Oil, for caring about writers, supporting art, and for bringing us the puppy dog tail (a gloriously rich cinnamony dough topped with devilish cream-sweet frosting).

A place like the Kenwood Cafe becomes so quickly a given, a community treasure, that everyone loses sight of the fact that its existence is based on dollars. Kenwood Cafe is closing, probably for good. We will miss everyone who worked there as friends; we will miss you in a larger sense as a real place in this great big boxy franchised world.

In that light, thank you customers, visitors, patrons. This year we noticed how many of you chose to buy books from us, or gifts, and to support our always tenuous existence. Everyone who worked through the holiday season was touched in some way by the decisions you made to support us. Truly, we felt the love!

We are hoping that your generosity will help us make it through those lean days when there's no latte and not a puppy dog tail to be had next door.

Thanks again, chi miigwech

We wouldn't be here without you.

Louise

Why The Tar Sands?

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 16:59:00 GMT

Dear Bookish Ones,

Why would our inoffensive little bookstore, loving as we do to please our friends and customers, suddenly decide to show a move that will break your heart?

H2Oil, the movie that we will be screening on October 27 and 28, at next door Kenwood Cafe, is honestly so upsetting that it is hard not to cry when you watch the trailer. Why would we ask you to see such a film? Why would we become so compelled by this particular issue, when all we've ever done before is recommend books?

Why so crucial, why this urgency? Simple. There is nothing more important -- right now, right here.

The Tar Sands operation in Canada produces three to four times more carbon that regular oil extraction. Bill McKibben has called it a carbon bomb. Climatologists have termed the operation "game over" for our climate. The boreal forest is basically scraped away in this method of strip-oil-mining -- removing the lungs of the earth. As you watch the movie, you will understand the tragic impact of this project on Native people and communities. Billions of gallons of fresh water are used to steam the tar out of the sand, and the Keystone XL pipeline, a huge plan enlarging drastically on pipelines already built, could spill into our largest fossil water aquifer, which lies beneath South Dakota. Even now, living where we do, we are using 80% Tar Sands oil.

Wildly profitable oil companies don't want you to know this: the future belongs to those countries who conserve their fresh water and develop clean energies.

At this moment, President Obama could just say no. He could stand up for our future -- stand up to big oil. He could keep his promise to heal the planet and reduce our dependence on oil in favor of clean energy. Obama could stop the Keystone XL pipeline, and send a powerful message to the world. He is expected to make his decision in mere weeks.

That is why it is so important to show H2Oil, to see this film, to tell your friends, and to pull up Bill McKibben's website 350.org and find out what is happening, and why, on November 6 -- it will be a historical day for the climate.

I don't have any books to talk about tonight. Friends, our existence is a narrow miracle. Can it really be that we'll make earth, this green joy, into a place where we cannot survive?

Louise

H2Oil Trailer

Bill McKibben and 350.org
Encircle the White House and Stop the Tar Sands on November 6!

Connect with people working on this issue:

Indigenous Environmental Network
Website: www.ienearth.org
Facebook: www.facebook.com/pages/Indigenous-Environmental-Network/186264980641
Twitter: twitter.com/IENearth

Tar Sands Action (National)
Website: tarsandsaction.org
Facebook: facebook.com/tarsandsaction
Twitter: twitter.com/tarsandsaction

Tar Sands Action (Minnesota)
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Twin-Cities-Tar-Sands-Action/275481812467416

350.org (National)
Website: 350.org
Facebook: facebook.com/350.org
Twitter: twitter.com/350

MN350 (Minnesota)
Website: MN350.org
Facebook: facebook.com/MN350
Twitter: twitter.com/MN_350

Windows of Clarity

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 16:43:00 GMT

Addicts of all types who eventually enter recovery know the phrase "window of clarity". Through the haze of drugs or booze, people have a poignant stroke of thought. People realize their addiction is deadly; it is collapsing their personal world. So, too, a cheap energy addict (like me) knows these moments. Every so often, I look at some object in my hand and see the unrecoverable petroleum that actually produced it. I drive 1-94 to see my parents and remember only 130 years ago this journey was harrowing, it took a month by ox cart or more in some seasons. Before that, people walked and working dogs dragged along their portable houses. In that window of clarity my car, all of our cars, which we take for granted, are magic carpets.

One such moment of clarity occurred this summer in Belcourt, North Dakota, on my home reservation where I went with my mother. I bought an apple in the grocery store. It was labeled Holland. The apple wasn't really from Holland, but it might as well have been. This apple appeared near the central Canadian Border in June -- it came from somewhere very, very far away. There are few places so remote that they do not get shipments of pesticide (petroleum) laced produce, fertilized (petroleum), harvested (petroleum) and shipped (petroleum) from a place equally mysterious and remote. The apple in my hand might as well have been tossed to the Turtle Mountains by a genie -- one created of a fabulously powerful substance accompanied by a deadly curse.

At our last bookstore meeting we talked as a group about what would make our work at Birchbark Books more meaningful. One of us said it would be great to enlarge our mission to include transitional thinking about how to strengthen local economies. The word "transitional" clicked with me. My windows of clarity, interspersed with bouts of magical thinking, included dread. Nobody likes to linger too long in a moment of clarity about climate change because it always ends in dread. Year by year I've tried to recycle, reduce, reuse. Still, the dread. And the word Collapse is enough to stop most thought. But the word Transition somehow pulled me out. Transition is not about dread, survivalist fear, a life of paranoia, hoarding guns and money and vacuum packed plastic barrels of grain. It is about producing our own energy and food, but in a joyous and meaningful way.

My mother's family gardened and canned and hunted all the food they ate only a generation ago, right there in the Turtle Mountains. My mother and father could still survive from their garden and orchard if they had too, even though they give most of what they grow away.

The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience by Rob Hopkins, is a great place to start reading. I recommend it as a positive beginning -- I have worked my way backward into Lester R. Brown's World On The Edge, and John Michael Greer's The Wealth of Nature, and Original Instructions, edited by Melissa K. Nelson, all excellent. As soon as I read The Transition Handbook, however, I realized that in Minneapolis we have the makings of a great transition city. Here are signs:

One year ago our bookstore faced a sheet of asphalt. Kenwood School was paved to the foundation. Last year that asphalt (petroleum) was torn out and replaced with a garden as miraculous as that apple in the Turtle Mountains. It was planted by (genies) the parents of schoolchildren, tended by the children (naturally produced) as well as more (eternal motion machines) parents, teachers, and now is being harvested. At the start of school barbeque, parents took home produce, marveling at the freshness, exchanging recipes. One boy looked at the top of a carrot showing in the dirt and asked, shyly, "can I pull it out?" He did, and walked away brushing his face dreamily with the soft carrot leaves. "I never knew they had tops" he murmured.

A moment of clarity for that boy, maybe, and for me a reason to enlarge our bookstore's offerings to include a section on Green Thinking, Urban Homesteading, Climate Change, The Commons, Indigenous Gardening -- all of the topics that I'd love to deny but can't. If we look over the sides of our magic carpets, we'll realize we're floating on thin air. If it's all the same, I'd rather coast down or "power down" than drop. But that requires living in that clarity, more reading, and taking action.

Thanks to all of our supporters who keep Birchbark Books going here on 21st Street. Watch for Diane Wilson reading from Beloved Child. She not only writes beautifully, but she is the director of Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous gardening project and an original partner of Birchbark Books.

Louise