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The Fargo Public Library's annual "Northern Narratives" winter writing project calls for submissions from writers aged 13 and above, accepting fiction, nonfiction, and poetry from February 1 to March 31 from all of North Dakota and parts of western Minnesota. A photogrophy project, "Northern Focus" is also discussed. ~~ Tom Isern explores the nuanced relationship between Great Plains authors and their homeland, focusing on Larry McMurtry and James W. Foley. Isern reflects on McMurtry's complex feelings about his Texan origins and parallels them with Foley's poetry, which articulates a deep connection and subsequent estrangement from the prairies. ~~ News Director Dave Thompson reviews the news ~~ Matt Olien reviews the movie “Wonka.”
Fargo Public Library Interview Highlights
The Northern Narratives Winter Writing Project, hosted by the Fargo Public Library, is an initiative aimed at fostering creativity within the community, particularly among writers. Launched in 2017, this program has evolved from a small workshop environment to a significant regional journal publication. It invites submissions from North Dakota and specific Minnesota counties, encompassing a wide demographic of participants aged 13 and above, regardless of their writing experience. The project offers categories for poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, with defined word limits to manage the volume of content for publication. Poetry has emerged as the most popular category, likely due to its concise nature allowing for a broader range of submissions within the word limit constraints.
The program is considered one of the "crown jewels" of the library's offerings, involving a year-long process from submission to publication. This includes a rigorous judging phase and culminates in a reception where contributors can read excerpts of their work. Additionally, Northern Narratives runs parallel to Northern Focus, a photography program that accepts entries from wider geographical locations, provided the photography subjects are within North Dakota or Minnesota.
The Northern Narratives Winter Writing Project not only showcases the library's commitment to supporting the arts and providing a platform for voices within the region but also reflects the community's engagement in storytelling and creative expression.
Fargo Public Library Interview Transcript
Main Street
Andy Gustafson, she's a lead in the Fargo Library Circulation Department. Welcome to Main Street.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Oh, thank you so much for having me.
Main Street
We are pleased that you are with us. This is the eighth year of the Northern Narratives Winter Writing Project, hosted by the Fargo Public Library. We want to learn all about it.
Tell me its history.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Well, it started back in 2017. So as you said, it's going to be our eighth year. It started when a couple of our librarians wanted to think of ways that we could encourage creativity in the community, provide more opportunities for artists, and specifically writers.
And so at the beginning, there were just like about a dozen people interested. It had more of a workshop feel. People could write kind of whatever they wanted.
And then they just published little zines, little magazines that people could just take for free, patrons of the library, whoever stopped in. But as our team at the library grew who wanted to work on this, that brought a lot of experience in things like writing and publishing. We really wanted to create a journal for the region that would provide more opportunity for people to have their voices heard.
And so we have grown a lot over the years.
Main Street
This project is open to anyone in North Dakota and also a portion of Minnesota.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Absolutely. The whole state of North Dakota is welcome to participate. And also our friends in Minnesota in our reciprocal area, which is the counties that the Lake Agassiz Regional Library covers.
So if you're from Minnesota and interested, and you live in the counties of Polk, Clearwater, Norman, Menomine, Clay, Becker, or Wilkin, or if you live in the city of Rossay, we are more than happy to have you participate with Northern Narratives.
Main Street
If I were to ask you how significant of a program this is for the library, the Northern Narratives, what would you tell me?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
I would say it's probably one of the crown jewels in our programming. It is a program that takes us all year to work on because we start with submissions at the beginning of the year. We go through, get those ready for judging.
The judges have to go through all of it. We get it back. We have to tabulate the scores.
And then we have to actually build the book. This all culminates closer to the end of the year with a big reception where we invite people to read excerpts of their work. And at the same time, we have a parallel program called Northern Focus, which is for photography.
For Northern Focus, so you can be from anywhere, but the photography has to be within North Dakota or Minnesota.
Main Street
What are the timelines for entry and categories too?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Right now, submissions are open. We're taking them through March 31st of this year. If you live in North Dakota or that Western area of Minnesota we discussed, and you're age 13 or older, so teens in addition to adults are welcome.
You can be any experience level. And we have categories in poetry, fiction, or non-fiction. So pretty much everything but script writing.
We're going to welcome here. And we do have some word limits because we can only publish so much. So poems can only be up to a thousand words, and fiction and non-fiction have to be between one thousand and six thousand words.
Main Street
What's been the most popular categories generally from year to year?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
It's usually poetry. I think because usually they take a little less time to write. So people have more that they've done that they can choose from that they really love to give to us.
Main Street
Generally the age groups that enter, would you tell me most are middle-aged folks, most are older folks, most are young people?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Most are adults. Within the adults there's a decent age spread, but we also like to reach out to our regional schools to get that younger voice in there too.
Main Street
We're going to have you read a couple excerpts from the Northern Narratives Project. Let's start with the first one. Tell me what you're going to read.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Well I'll start here with one of the fiction pieces that we published last year. It's a modern take on Hansel and Gretel. It's called Harry and Gail, and it's written by T.J. Feer. And I'll read the first part to whet your appetite. The witch knew their arrival was inevitable. After hiding and thriving in the woods for centuries, the modern world reached the witch's front door in the guise of two somber men holding legal documents claiming the fatal word's eminent domain.
As she did with most strangers, the witch hissed and frightened them away with her best butcher knife. At first this appeared to work, until the somber men returned with a sheriff, a gaggle of deputies, and a damp-eyed wisp of a woman they called a social worker. A myriad of strange words and legal documents came with the motley crew.
According to the heavily-sentenced social worker, the local government intended to reroute the river outside her cottage, and she was in the Of course the witch put up a fight. How dare they try to remove her from her home? She had lived there since before most of them were born.
She was just a little old lady. Couldn't they leave her in peace? And please stop touching her stuff, especially the knives.
The people crowding her home gaped as if they had never seen a wood-burning stove, shelves of candy-making utensils, or hand-woven rugs made with children's hair. Fortunately, they didn't look too closely at those rugs.
Main Street
I'll bet you have a wide array of subject matter to get through.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Absolutely. We really encourage any genre. Just like the library on our shelves, we will stock any kind of thing you might want to read.
We want to leave that open and up to the writers.
Main Street
What do you think motivates people to write? People read all the time. But then there's the next step of actually wanting to write something.
What do people tell you?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Well, you're talking to someone who loves storytelling. So for me, it honestly goes back to what makes us human. If you can think back to before we actually literally wrote things down, what were we doing?
We were sitting together around the fire and we were telling stories. We were making music with whatever was at hand. We were dancing.
We were taking fruit juice and finger-painting on the wall. Storytelling is part of what makes us who we are. Writing is one medium in which you can do that.
I think it's very important to provide people with an avenue to have their voice heard and have their stories told.
Main Street
Relative to Northern Focus, what kind of entries do you see?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Northern Focus, we see absolutely everything, as long as it is in North Dakota, Minnesota. So we see, of course, because you have such beautiful landscape in these two states, lots of nature. But we also see things with people.
We see day. We see night. We see humor, even.
You know, people stuck in the snow bank or all sorts of things. It's just, it really runs the gamut of artistic expression.
Main Street
Can you give me an idea of maybe two or three of your favorite pictures that have come your way?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Absolutely. The reason Northern Narratives partners with Northern Focus is one picture is chosen to be the cover of Northern Narratives when we actually print the book. Last year's winner was called Yellow Jacket on Grape Leaf, and it was taken by Jeffrey Westgaard in his backyard in Dilworth, Minnesota.
It is a big close-up of a yellow jacket on a grape leaf, but very strikingly.
Main Street
That yellow jacket is maybe, what, six inches tall there, at least in the photograph, it appears?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
It appears huge, and even more so because it has just decapitated a fly. We know that it's about to chow down and have some brunch.
Main Street
Is that the eye of a fly I'm seeing? I wonder what I'm seeing there that he's just about ready. Oh, he's got the fly in his.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
He's got the body of the fly.
Main Street
Oh my goodness.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Right up against his mandibles, and then the head of the fly is sitting next to him on the leaf. We were all so shocked when we saw it. We could not get it out of our heads, and when we sent all the photos off to the judges, they must have felt the same way because they came back and they're like, no other but this can be the cover.
Main Street
I have never seen a photo like that.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Exactly.
Main Street
And it was in his backyard.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
It was in his backyard. Now, Northern Focus is for either up-and-coming or recreational photographers, so we do say you have to make less than 50 percent of your income with photography, but as you can tell, you don't have to be professional to take an amazing photo.
Main Street
That is an amazing picture. A couple more examples of great photos you happen to recall?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Yes, absolutely. So I'm thinking of some of our previous covers. So in 2022, the cover was called Milky Way and Meteor, taken by Gordon Court, and it was a landscape photo, so it's the front and the back cover all together, and it was a long exposure, so you can see the Milky Way.
You see a meteor coming in just at the top. It's out in the country, a hay bale. You could not feel more like the region.
You just feel odd looking at it, and then in 2021, we had a cover called Wild Horses, and it's this beautiful spread fog in the background of wild horses over in western North Dakota.
Main Street
Beautiful. Once the library receives submissions for Northern Narratives or even the submissions that are made for Northern Focus, what happens to them, and then what does a writer retain relative to his work?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
So for both Northern Narratives and Northern Focus, when we receive submissions, they basically get processed, randomly assigned numbers, make sure we have our spreadsheets so everything is, information is kept correctly, but we basically randomize and anonymize them, so when we send them to the judges, they literally get no information about who created the work at all, so as unbiased as possible when looking at the pieces, and so when they score them, we can be confident that it was based on merit and not on anything else.
So for Northern Narratives, it functions under first rights copyright. Once we publish your work, all copyright is retained by the writer. We are not proprietary at all.
All we ask is that if you do get it published somewhere else, it comes with the attribution that it was first published with the Fargo Public Library in Northern Narratives. For Northern Focus, it's very similar. You retain the copyright to your photo.
We just reserve the right for if we're going to advertise Northern Focus another year or we're going to advertise a program at the library, we just retain the right to be able to use your photograph as part of that advertisement, but we don't make money off of their work. When we publish the Northern Narrative books, they are sold at cost, and this is because this program, because it does cost money to publish real books because these are real books published, we are supported by the friends of the Fargo Public Library. Every year we've been doing this project, they've very generously given us the money to print these books and also to print the photos of Northern Focus because we put them up in a free gallery at our downtown library and we would not be able to do it without their support.
They're the non-profit we have locally to support the Fargo Public Library.
Main Street
Really enjoying our conversation with Andy Gustafson. She's the lead in the Fargo Library Circulation Department. Does it cost to enter either one of the programs?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
That's one of the major things that's wonderful about this. A lot of journals you see around, they will charge money for you to submit because that's how they keep afloat and make money to print. But because we have that support from Friends of the Fargo Public Library, everything is free to you at every point in the process.
Main Street
You have a poem, I think, that you would like to read for us, Andy, and you also indicated earlier that poetry is the most popular genre, if you will, of work that people submit to you.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
It absolutely is, and we see all kinds of poetry, so don't be shy in sending it in. The one I chose for you guys today is called Wild Moon and it's by Carla Smart Morstead. Poets say grow more fur and dream of licking stones and bark and so I shoulder house cats, breathe furred hips, sniff their paws, their moist tartared yawns.
Sometimes we are just alike, sharing quilted sleep, relishing processed food. My felines craft, play, and teach its rhythm and purpose. They take ample rest and we are so much the same until the moon fattens herself and they journey into wild, pying walls, changing voices, dismissing drowsiness, pursuing a certain satisfying anxiety I do not know.
What is it to be a cat or coyote or timber wolf? To be eagle or wind? I want to know water thousands of feet deep.
Let me be uprooted trees and burgeoning fern. I want to lap rainwater and leaves. Let me be rock-crusted land, soft earth, ground knotted with roots.
I will circle and trample prairie grass before sleep. Let me slit the sky. I want to be lightning or frozen rain or sunrise.
Teach me to transform, to know November from inside wind, to know the unmoving wild silence of August air. I claim the odor of singed fur, the death motion of eagle and salmon, talon locked, rolling under while surging skyward. Then come nights when the moon peels her own bright knowledges.
My clawless creatures released stretch and moan at dawn. They pat pouches of catnip and taste my toes while I, in dark coffee contentment, search newsprint for word of the world. We are kin again.
I serve bites of cheese and praise my spirit teachers awaiting wild moon.
Main Street
Do you own a cat?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
I don't.
Main Street
Neither do I.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
But I love animals.
Main Street
Are there prizes?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
There aren't prizes per se. There is the way that you do get a free copy of the Northern Narratives book if you are published within it for Northern Focus. Everybody's photo gets put up in our gallery but there is a cover contest winner who's the front cover of Northern Narratives and we will have several honorable mentions and the cover contest winner and the honorable mentions will have their own booklet published of their photographs.
Main Street
Andy, I briefed you off mic that I would ask you this question and I've wondered about it in context of what you may start to see now from people being submitted. AI. I can ask AI to write anything.
Is that a concern that you may start seeing some things that maybe weren't legitimately written by author who submitted it?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
It is a concern of course. I mean it's all we've been talking about for a year it feels the whole world's been talking about it. We did update our rules to say that you cannot use a large language model what might colloquially be called an AI to write even a portion at any point of your work because this is a project to celebrate the work of writers.
Large language models is taking a bunch of other people's written work often without any compensation and it's called large language model because it's based on probability. So what you're going to get is like a very milquetoast kind of doesn't really have any thought or emotion behind it kind of very flat prose or poem that really if you read it doesn't actually read like something an artist would do. So I would encourage you if you are thinking of doing it that it's not worth it and you will have much more fun making your voice the one that is on the page.
Main Street
And to honor the honor system here.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Honor the honor system. I mean we our judges do have backgrounds and things like writing, teaching, editing, publishing. So you know they're going to recognize good work when they see it and generally speaking AI is not good work.
Main Street
What would you tell someone who is I've written some things I don't know if it's really good enough or that I'm good enough to submit. What would you tell them?
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
I would say you've got to submit. One of the great things that Northern Narratives does is gives people an opportunity to see their work published. Yes but an opportunity to go through the motions of what is it like to put myself out there.
Could I continue doing this for other journals for other opportunities? Is there the possibility that we won't publish your work? Yes there is that possibility but if you go through it then you know what it feels like and you know how to prepare yourself the next time.
I know someone who even who sent their work out to journals all over the country and they literally wallpapered their office with their rejection notes.
Main Street
I wouldn't want to look at those every day.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Some people need the motivation but the point is something like this is a difficult profession to be in but you don't have to be a professional to do it. It's not necessarily that your work isn't good it's just like did what you put on a page speak to the people judging and scoring because there's always a subjective piece of art and that subjective piece is is my soul speaking to your soul and that's really ultimately what the judges are looking at.
Main Street
Tell me a couple of other programs that the library has on its short-range calendar here that our listeners should know about.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Absolutely we have crafts going all the time for all age groups so keep an eye out for all of those. We have story times and baby rhyme times for kids every week. One of the programs I'm really looking forward to in April is the new North Dakota Poet Laureate Denise Lachamadier is coming to talk about her kids book Josie Dances because North Dakota is sending that book to the National Book Festival to represent our state.
Main Street
Lastly Andy there may be someone who is listening who went to the library maybe as a kid but has never come back what would you tell that person how would you invite them to see how libraries maybe are different today and what libraries can offer.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Libraries really offer so much today of course we always want to offer all different kinds of books which you need but we also offer lots of technology we have free wi-fi we have free computers to use we have mobile hot spots you can get on the waiting list for in addition to books we have things like movies we have board games which are so expensive to buy but so fun to play we have video games we have so many programs like we've talked about and one of the things that's really cool is that when you walk into any of our three locations you really see a great cross section of the community people from all walks of life and from all neighborhoods and all interests come to the library because it's one of the great bastions of our community.
Main Street
I certainly agree with that. One more time the entry deadlines for both Northern Narratives and also Northern Focus.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
So Northern Narratives is open now and we'll be accepting online submissions only until March 31st of this year and so you'll want to go to fargolibrary.org to look for that. Once Northern Narratives closes at the end of March 1st of April we'll be accepting submissions for Northern Focus and that will go through the end of May so two months for both programs.
Main Street
And again anyone from North Dakota or a good portion of western Minnesota they're all eligible to enter both programs.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Ages 13 and up and then anyone's eligible to submit to Northern Focus as long as the photo itself was taken within North Dakota or Minnesota.
Main Street
Andy Gustafson she's one of the leads in the Fargo Library's Circulation Department. Thanks for joining us on Main Street.
Andy Gustafson, Fargo Public Library
Thanks so much for inviting me.
NOTE: This transcript was generated with AI tools. The audio of the show is the official record.