We're opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop this spring in partnership with Dancing the Land Farm!
Come meet us, say hello, and pick up a good book!
Come meet us, say hello, and pick up a good book!
Welcome to our Online Bookstore!
Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood
$16.00
With a journalist’s eye for detail and a poet’s capacity for wonder, Bright captures the intense moments of early motherhood.
Here are the worry and the fierce delight, the 3 a.m. wake-ups, and the floor strewn with Cheerios. These poems read like snapshots, freeze-framing days that feel both fleeting and unending, even while the rest of the poet’s life hums in the background, waiting for its turn to thrive.
Mirage of Destiny: The Story of the 1990-91 Minnesota North Stars
$35.00
Minnesota has more youth, high school, college, and pro hockey players than anywhere in the United States. For all that pedigree, and despite fifty years in the NHL, it still waits for a Stanley Cup championship team. This is the improbable tale of when the self-professed State of Hockey came closest to that title with the Minnesota North Stars. Through most of the 1990-91 schedule, the team was among the worst in the NHL on the ice, and dead last at the turnstiles. But in February and March, the North Stars began to win a little more. Future Hall of Famer, Mike Modano, and a cast of characters ranging from better-than-average to journeymen played some of the best hockey of their lives behind a homegrown goalie who made everyone believe in fairy tales, for a while. This is the story of the team with the worst regular-season record in any of the major North American sports leagues to play for a modern championship. The second half of Mirage of Destiny relates the exhilaration, heartbreak, and the real lives of all those players, coaches and staff who came so close to being part of something historic thirty years ago.
Oak Island, Knights Templar, and the Holy Grail: Secrets of "The Underground Project" Revealed
$20.00
ISBN: 978-1-68201-152-2
Pre-Orders Only. Orders will ship in mid-March.
One of the most enduring mysteries of all time is
what happened on Oak Island in Nova Scotia.
Was treasure buried there? Is it still there?
The Curse of Oak Island on History Channel investigated the mystery, spending millions of dollars over ten seasons, and could not find the treasure. Both Scott Wolter and Donald Ruh have had firsthand involvement with the island and its mysteries over the years. Don shared two maps with Rick and Marty Lagina via his friend and co-researcher Zena Halpern, and Scott brought his experience with multiple visits to the island. However, they had little interest in the mystery until early in 2023 when a trove of encrypted documents came to Don as part of his research of the Knights’ Templar Cremona Document materials. Once decoded, the five messages, three sketches, and one new map of the island revealed shockingly detailed information about who constructed “The Underground Project,” put treasure there, and what happened to it. Finally, the over six-centuries-long mystery has been solved. Incredibly, the documents also provide new insight into the fabled Holy Grail.
The Mare and the Mouse
$22.00
The first volume in the Stories of My Horses trilogy.
Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s new book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the reservation, and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.
Meant to be read aloud to crowds around campfires, especially to people who are mistaken that only rich people or rednecks ride horses, Prechtel credits both his own physical and spiritual survival in “modernity’s mad rush to nowhere” with the sanity of riding and living with his natural-born Southwestern horses. Not raised for show, performance, status, or money, these little horses allowed a way of living that took him flying over ravines into deep-mountain Holy places, backwards over streams, and in general keeping alive a sparkier, older spirit in an age where horses have been grossly de-natured and sadly removed from our own everyday lives after three millennia as the closest companions of our ancestors’ dreams and mythologies.
But, Prechtel says, he wrote this book “specially for people to be inspired to live magically and in depth with animals, and to give people to understand that it’s never too late to start living in a more tangible, dusty way—maybe even flying over the ground on the back of a big furry animal—in a way that inspires life. If you want to have good memory, you have to do things that are worth remembering. Time to get busy!”
“On the Res none of us were horse trainers and nobody I knew really whispered to their horses, some people yelled at them, but we did know that neither whispering nor yelling did much good, unless you could keep a peaceful image in your head that you wanted the horse to absorb into theirs. In any case what horses fear the most is human cowardice, so we had to have the courage to think a thought beyond what we wanted the horse to do, we had to think a thought a horse would think, which mostly has to do with looking really cool in a herd of other magnificent horses, then in a trance grazing beautiful, short wild grasses on the sides of magnificent, mica-covered, red ochre hills, and then being scared of nothing and running like hell to the next equivalent grazing heaven. If you could keep that in your heart, your knees, your hands, your eyes, keeping all the human noise out of your head, then whether you whispered or croaked like a toad, the horse would follow that thought to whatever you thought the two of you should do! Of course you had to be able to laugh at yourself if it didn’t work, because good horses also respect a person who is courageous enough to fail and who can laugh at himself for even thinking a horse should do a person’s will.”
--from The Mare and the Mouse
Minnesota's Lost Towns: Northern Edition
$19.95
Author: Rhonda Fochs
Description:
Journey to the past and visit over 100 northern Minnesota lost towns. Read what created them, how they grew and prospered, why they died, where they are located, and what you’ll see there today. Learn the stages of a “boom and bust” cycle and how lost towns are classified according to their physical remnants. Written in a personal narrative style, Minnesota’s Lost Towns is filled with then and now photos and amusing tales and anecdotes. The book is a fun read for historians, tourists, genealogists, and anyone who loves a good story.
Reviews:
Description:
Journey to the past and visit over 100 northern Minnesota lost towns. Read what created them, how they grew and prospered, why they died, where they are located, and what you’ll see there today. Learn the stages of a “boom and bust” cycle and how lost towns are classified according to their physical remnants. Written in a personal narrative style, Minnesota’s Lost Towns is filled with then and now photos and amusing tales and anecdotes. The book is a fun read for historians, tourists, genealogists, and anyone who loves a good story.
Reviews:
“Minnesota’s Lost Towns carries the perfect blend of history and nostalgia. Rhonda Fochs shares stories and photos of forgotten places with wit and humor that will hold your interest to the very end. Whether you live in Minnesota or are a visitor to our state, you’ll love delving into this wonderful book and learning about those places that no longer exist.”
—Candace Simar, author of Abercrombie Trail, Pomme de Terre, Birdie, and Blooming Prairie
“What a joy to find a compact book filled with the stories of northern Minnesota’s lost towns! The author reminds us of the historical and cultural impact of vanished towns, now just a memory in history books and in the hearts of families who once called them home. Minnesota’s Lost Towns: Northern Edition is a tribute to the people who built a life out of very little and had the courage to move on and try again.”
—Jill A. Johnson, author of Little Minnesota: 100 Towns Around 100
About the Author: After several years of working in the public and private sector, doing everything from assembling Tonka Toy trucks (when they were made in America), working in a LP record distribution warehouse, serving in a variety of public governmental roles, managing a construction office, to becoming a social studies teacher at the age of forty-two, Rhonda is recently retired. Her passion for history, especially local and regional history, has resulted in Minnesota’s Lost Towns: Northern Edition, which chronicles over 100 northern Minnesota used-to-be towns and communities. As she and her family (including the dog) travel the state, north, east, south and west, she is now working on the second book in the Lost Towns Series, this one covering Central Minnesota. She is also presently working on a book detailing other regional points of interest. You can learn more about Rhonda and her books at www.rhondafochs.weebly.com or at www.facebook.com/MinnesotasLostTowns
Sherman's Woodticks: The Adventures, Ordeals and Travels of the Eighth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry During the Civil War
$28.00
During the last year of the Civil War, the Eighth Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment traveled more miles and served under more extreme conditions than any other unit in the Union Army. From the Yellowstone River all the way to North Carolina, the soldiers endured dehydration, hunger, and exhausting marches, often while exposed to scorching heat or bitter cold. They fought against foes led by Sitting Bull and General Nathan Bedford Forest, but came away victorious each time. Drawn from among the first settlers of the newly-formed state of Minnesota, the soldiers from Company E, the focus of this book, were tough frontiersmen and also proud patriots who enlisted with the determination to be good soldiers in service of their country. Fiercely independent, the men had little patience for bureaucracy and despised injustice. When unfairly treated, they didn’t just grin and bear it—they actively rebelled, sometimes with humorous results. Meticulously researched, Sherman’s Woodticks for the first time brings together the full story of the men of the Eighth Minnesota Volunteers who gave up so much for their country, from their enlistment in 1862 until they mustered out in 1865.
The Kontum Madonna
$15.00
By J. Vincent Hansen
Illustrations by Dick Adair
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.
Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.
Illustrations by Dick Adair
50 years after the war Hansen continues to mine his time in Vietnam as an 18-year-old machine gunner with the 101st Airborne Division. These poems inform us that no soldier ever grows so old as to see a war's final ripple.
J. Vincent Hansen grew up on a farm near Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. After high school, he spent three years in the Army followed by seven years working in East Africa as an agricultural volunteer with the Maryknoll Fathers. He is the recipient of the 1990 Loft-McKnight Award for Poetry, and a 2009 Bush Artist Fellowship in Poetry. He is the author of the books Blessed Are the Piecemakers, Without Dividend in Mind, The Medicine of Place, and a multi-media play, The Wedding of Tomorrow and Sorrow. He lives with his wife, Jeanette, in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota.
Dick Adair (1935-2018) was a Navy journalist and war correspondent for the military newspaper Stars and Stripes and also the author of the book Saigon published by Weatherhill in 1971. Later in life his art brought him many awards while working as a cartoonist in Honolulu, Hawaii.
It's Murder, You Betcha
$20.00
By Jeanne Cooney
ISBN 978-1-68201-148-5
Move over Stephanie Plum, Betty Crocker, and the residents of Lake Wobegon. Retired farmer Doris Day Anderson Connor and her quirky friends and relatives are solving crime in the Scandinavian-Lutheran farming community of Hallock, in the northwest corner of Minnesota.
This book, the second installment in the It’s Murder series, has Doris and her sister, Grace KellyAnderson, the owner of the local café, taking ninety-year-old Rose O’Brien ice fishing. The day ends, however, with nothing to show for their efforts except a dead body.
With Rose distressed over the crime, Doris feels compelled to make inquiries in an effort to move the murder investigation along, much to the chagrin of the sheriff, an old boyfriend and a current puzzle. While in the café, at a funeral, and during a gender-reveal-party blizzard, she uncovers answers, but she also learns secrets and lies that lead her to wonder if she truly knows the residents of her hometown. After all, at least one of them is a killer.
Sister Lumberjack
$22.00
ISBN: 978-1-68201-150-8
Pre-orders only. Orders will ship in mid-March.
Bottle fever has Nels Jensen by the throat. Swindled out of his summer’s pay, he heads to the logging camps of Northern Minnesota, only to discover he is blacklisted at reputable operations. He is neither a thief nor a liar, but he cannot prove his innocence.
Widow Solveig Rognaldson is left alone with heartache and a mortgage. Without a well-paying job, she will lose her Foxhome farm. Her son marries and moves away. Though she feels too old, she musters courage to strike out on her own. She has to save the farm by herself. She has no one else.
Trouble follows Sister Magdalena, a jolly nun who struggles with rules. A giant of a woman, she is sent to sell hospital tickets to lumberjacks working the forests of Minnesota. It is dangerous work, and those with a ticket receive free health care if they are injured. She travels alone to isolated logging camps in the dead of winter, sometimes by snowshoes. The jacks call her Sister Lumberjack.
These three lives intersect at Starkweather Timber, a haywire logging camp where everything goes wrong. Their unique friendship turns their lives in unexpected directions.
Red Cliff, Wisconsin: A History of an Ojibwe Community - Volume 1, The Earliest Years: The Origin to 1854
$19.95
Author: Howard D. Paap
Description: Red Cliff, Wisconsin: A History of an Ojibwe Community, (Volume 1), is the story of the first three hundred and more years of the Ojibwe people in the Chequamegon Bay region of western Lake Superior. This volume covers the Ojibwes’ arrival, the coming of the French, English, and Americans, and concludes with 1854 and the advent of the reservation era. Telling the history of the first people in the area, Howard Paap expertly shows how the early French traders and the English and Americans who eventually resettled the land affected the Ojibwe people. Using treaties and writings from the era, he also explores the forces at work—on either side—in the long history of Chequamegon Bay and the surrounding areas. Through it all, he shows objective compassion for those caught inbetween the governments’ wishes and those of the people.
Review:
“I consider Howard Paap to be a very gifted writer and researcher. He has been part of our community for a major part of his life, and with that comes the trust of the people. Tribes in general have had so much untruth written about their history and culture, and I am so grateful he has written this book."
—Rose Gurnoe-Soulier, Chairperson, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa
About the Author: Howard Paap taught anthropology for thirty years, and now lives in Bayfield, Wisconsin, with his wife Marlene, where he writes, sits on various municipal and reservation committees at both Bayfied and Red Cliff, and enjoys his growing grandchildren.
Description: Red Cliff, Wisconsin: A History of an Ojibwe Community, (Volume 1), is the story of the first three hundred and more years of the Ojibwe people in the Chequamegon Bay region of western Lake Superior. This volume covers the Ojibwes’ arrival, the coming of the French, English, and Americans, and concludes with 1854 and the advent of the reservation era. Telling the history of the first people in the area, Howard Paap expertly shows how the early French traders and the English and Americans who eventually resettled the land affected the Ojibwe people. Using treaties and writings from the era, he also explores the forces at work—on either side—in the long history of Chequamegon Bay and the surrounding areas. Through it all, he shows objective compassion for those caught inbetween the governments’ wishes and those of the people.
Review:
“I consider Howard Paap to be a very gifted writer and researcher. He has been part of our community for a major part of his life, and with that comes the trust of the people. Tribes in general have had so much untruth written about their history and culture, and I am so grateful he has written this book."
—Rose Gurnoe-Soulier, Chairperson, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa
About the Author: Howard Paap taught anthropology for thirty years, and now lives in Bayfield, Wisconsin, with his wife Marlene, where he writes, sits on various municipal and reservation committees at both Bayfied and Red Cliff, and enjoys his growing grandchildren.
Wandering Webwood: Stay-at-Home Nature During the Pandemic
$36.00
For Larry Weber, the pandemic time turned into almost three years without going much beyond the boundaries of his home in Carlton County, Minnesota. However, with plenty of walking and and a keen eye observing what was happening in his own backyard, Larry was able to continue writing his weekly nature columns for the Duluth News Tribune. Wandering WebWood is a compilation of more than 150 columns written during the pandemic.
Black Otter Bay
$14.95
Author: Vincent Wyckoff
Blurbs:
“Vincent Wyckoff writes as both a novelist and a naturalist, bringing to life a vivid cast of characters (go, Abby!) as well as engaging the reader’s senses in the beauty and wildness of Minnesota’s North Shore. Black Otter Bay is suspenseful, surprising, and satisfying.”
– Lorna Landvik, author of Best to Laugh
“Set against a backdrop of Lake Superior, Wyckoff’s compelling mystery is populated with upright folks and roiling with a seedy undercurrent. This is a cabin must-read.”
– Jane St. Anthony, author of Isabelle Day Refuses to Die of a Broken Heart
About the Author: Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Vincent Wyckoff dedicated a career to the U.S. Postal Service. His first book, Beware of Cat: and Other Encounters of a Letter Carrier, celebrates the stories of people on his route. Prior to that, he attended the University of Minnesota and served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army. For a short time he lived on the North Shore of Lake Superior, from which he developed the background for Black Otter Bay, his first work of fiction. Wyckoff and his wife, Sybil, are long- time residents of south Minneapolis. They have three children and six grandchildren.
ISBN: 978-1-68201-026-6
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Page Count: 310
Publication Date: June 2016
Blurbs:
“Vincent Wyckoff writes as both a novelist and a naturalist, bringing to life a vivid cast of characters (go, Abby!) as well as engaging the reader’s senses in the beauty and wildness of Minnesota’s North Shore. Black Otter Bay is suspenseful, surprising, and satisfying.”
– Lorna Landvik, author of Best to Laugh
“Set against a backdrop of Lake Superior, Wyckoff’s compelling mystery is populated with upright folks and roiling with a seedy undercurrent. This is a cabin must-read.”
– Jane St. Anthony, author of Isabelle Day Refuses to Die of a Broken Heart
About the Author: Born and raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Vincent Wyckoff dedicated a career to the U.S. Postal Service. His first book, Beware of Cat: and Other Encounters of a Letter Carrier, celebrates the stories of people on his route. Prior to that, he attended the University of Minnesota and served a tour of duty in the U.S. Army. For a short time he lived on the North Shore of Lake Superior, from which he developed the background for Black Otter Bay, his first work of fiction. Wyckoff and his wife, Sybil, are long- time residents of south Minneapolis. They have three children and six grandchildren.
ISBN: 978-1-68201-026-6
Trim Size: 5.5 x 8.5
Page Count: 310
Publication Date: June 2016