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- [Voiceover] Funding for A Sense of Place,
the Minnesota Writers' Project,
was provided in part by the Minnesota Humanities Commission,
in cooperation with the National Endowment
for the Humanities and the Minnesota State Legislature.
(slow, somber music)

(Native American flute music)

- "Coyote the Trickster used to be shy,
"he who was always in the front row, waving at the camera,
"shouting at everything in sight.
"A long time ago, Coyote talked quietly.
"You could say he was even shy.
"The grandfathers were proud of him, because you see,
"when you tell a story,
"the little words you speak migrate to the ear
"and when Coyote first spoke,
"he spoke this way
"and his words ran like small animals covered with fur
"and crawled into the cave of the ear,
"where the words hibernate for a while,
"then begin to turn and scratch and come slowly awake,
"and tell their story.
"That's how stories get started.
"Hardly before you know it, one gets into your head,
"and after a while, you hear it,
"and you begin to know who you are."

I always felt like an outsider
and even in school they would say,
"What nationality are you?" or "Where are you from?"
And so I always had a sense of needing to define myself
and I was also very shy;
I did not speak a lot.
When I had the written word, I had a sense of authority,
or a sense of foundation, of place,
and sometimes I get an image or a thought
and I don't know if it's gonna be in a play
or a poem or a short story or an essay or a novel.
I love poetry, probably is my favorite,
because it speaks from the heart.
It is my own personal voice.
And then fiction, you can bring in other people.
You're still dealing with yourself in a way,
but you can bring in others.
And then I think my plays are
the lost voices of my ancestors,
my family, women, who did not have a chance to speak,
who did not have a voice.

Generally in literature, you have to begin with
some sort of conflict and it rises to the crisis,
and then there is the denouement.
In fact, you can just trace the way it should go.
Well, mine doesn't go that way.
It kind of circles along the trail like this,
because that's the Native American way of speaking.
It's like rain falling on your windshield
instead of on the road getting from here to there.
It's that process of the journey.
It's like I finally have a chance to talk
and I've got so much to say, I don't know what to do,
and so you dart in with this and that,
and you say it in all kinds of different ways.
It's like, you know, not being able to breathe a long time,
and you finally suck air in.
It's almost, not frantic, that's not the right word,
but it's, you know,

there's an immediacy to it.

I had a call to come up and look at Macalester
and so I drove up and I walked around the campus
and I thought, "Can I be happy here?"
And I was out on the lawn, and then I was in here,
and I realized that I really could feel at home.
You know in the Sundance, there's a cottonwood tree,
and there's always the center of the arena
and then the sides.
And the Sundancers went around and around the arena,
much like a space like this.
And I think to have a place, to have a piece of land,
that you feel one with,
that to me is the first key of feeling at home.
"It's hard, you know, without the buffalo,
"the shaman, the arrow, but my father went out
"each day to hunt as though he had them.
"He worked in the stockyards.
"All his life he brought us meat.
"No one marked his first kill.
"No one sang his buffalo song.
"Without a vision, he had migrated to the city
"and went to work in the packing house.
"When he brought home his horns and hides,
"my mother said, 'Get rid of them.'
"I remember the animal tracks of his car,
"backing out the drive in snow and mud.
"The aerial on his old car waving like a bowstring.
"I remember the silence of his lost power,
"the red buffalo painted on his chest.
"Oh, I couldn't see it, but it was there,
"and in the night, I heard his buffalo grunts like a snore."

My families were from the land.
My mother's people were farmers in Kansas.
They knew the land all their lives,
and my father's people were too,
but he had lost his land.
His people had been moved
900 miles from the southeast to Oklahoma
during the Trail of Tears.
So I had all this trying to place
who I was and what I was from a broken heritage.
And my grandmother was a woman of very few words,
my Cherokee grandmother, she did not speak,
but somehow in her silence and her not speaking,
a lot passed into me.

And I remember waking up sometimes in the morning
as a child, my hand clenched like this,
thinking something was in it, you know,
and I would open my hand and,
of course, nothing would be there.
And I think it was words that I was wanting.

You know how you can put a shell to your ear
and hear the ocean?
I think you can do that also with rocks.
I don't hear anything, really, with my ear,
but in my imagination,
I can see my father traveling around, stopping,
getting out of the car, finding rocks.
My mother saying, "What are you doing out there?"
She was a very practical woman.
"Get back in the car and let's go on."

As a writer, I can drive out onto the land and hear it.
Part of its job is to be a companion to me,
to share its words, to be worth its creation.
In fact, sometimes landscape actually tells the story.
If you wanna know what's going on in the story,
just read the imagery of the landscape.
If the land is made of words,
couldn't you hear them if you listened?

- I think we are to landscapes

as goslings are to their mothers,

that the landscapes

we first get to know as tiny babies,

and ones that really become fixed in our memories
in some long

and enduring way.

You do have a tendency to look at a prairie
and say, "Well, it's all just a bunch of stuff."
And then you start--I mean, once you start looking,
these grasses all really do have
very distinctive personalities.

I wish I could think what this is.
Oh, yes. Okay.
I don't remember which one.
It's hard to tell at this stage, but this is a mint.
This tall reed is your reed called Phragmites.

It's a reed that grows everywhere in the world.
I had a biblical scholar look it up for me once.
He said it really is the stuff that was used
to weave the basket that Moses floated down the Nile in
when he was a baby.

All of the serious writing I've done
has come out of first immersing myself
in some little piece of the world,
and studying and thinking about it.
And then going home to my desk
to try to figure out what it was that I saw.

So when I'm out, the process is really just
to concentrate on the experience,
and then when I come back, I think about the trip
and remember it,
and in remembering it,
I think we do redo, remake it.
So the journeys that exist on the pages of my books
are journeys that really have been taken
at least twice, I think.
"The prairie is bountifully utilitarian,
"but it is lovely too,
"in a hundred thousand ways and in a million details,
"many of them so finely wrought
"that one must drop to one's knees to appreciate them.

"That is what, over all else, the prairie teaches us.

"There need be no contradiction between utility and beauty."

Well, this is the Blue Mounds.
It's one of the really startling features
of the landscape of southwestern Minnesota,
particularly if you're coming from the east.
I wrote about them fairly extensively in an essay,
and recalled the necessity of empty places.
I was making a grand tour of the Great Plains in that book,
and this is where I started.
It seemed the right place to start
and the right place to come home to.
This is one of my favorite spots, not only in Minnesota,
but I think in all the world.
When I say that I think a lot about place,
I think a lot about it
because I think the fortunes of places
and the fortunes of people really are intimately connected
that one matters to the other.

(background chatter)

(group laughing and chatting)

It's one of those tasks that never gets old I've discovered.

There's some things that you don't like to repeat,
but this one I would repeat as many times as necessary.

I often get this at cocktail parties,
I suppose all writers do.
Someone will come up to you and say,
"Oh, what do you do?"
and you say, "Well, I'm a writer."
There are two possible responses to that.
One is that the person immediately turns heel
and finds another drink
because you can't think what to say to a writer.
And the other is to say, "Oh, I'm so envious of you.
"I've always wanted to be a writer myself,
"but of course for me, it's hard."

or "but of course I don't have the time"
or something like that.
Well, you know the truth is I tell this to my students
and I tell it workshop people,
they don't wanna hear it,
but the truth is writing is just hard work.

In my growing up, I was often very lonely

and so I found my way
into the fields,
into the marsh lands,
and the river valley below our house
and to the river really in search of consolation,
I think as much as anything else.
It was that habit of going back to the land
for consolation that became the way of my life,
one that has become richly rewarding,

but which I certainly wouldn't have come to
had I not been lonely.

My first impulse to write was
to try to figure out what it was about this landscape
that made me feel so happy and at home
when I came back here from the east coast.

And I suppose everything in my work
has had something since then
to do with trying to make out that puzzle.
Why are places so important to me
and I think to people generally?

For writing, I don't know whether it is myself I seek

or the land or the connection between them

or if, in fact, there is any difference.

(soft, flowing melody)

- [Anthony] I find myself
in the enviable position of being able
to write about something that I love dearly
and to express it for other people.
I can't separate what I write
and the people and places
and weather of this community.

Hi, Herb.
- [Man] Morning buddy.
- [Anthony] I wouldn't want to go on writing
if I couldn't write about the community I live it.
What time you start?
- [Man] 8:40
- Quarter of
(street noise downs out sound)
Before this community is lost to memory,
it's ethnic Polish community is lost to memory,
I want to try
to write it.
To write it and thus to remember it for myself
and the doing of it and for others
who might happen upon these stories and these books.
In old customs, Marta Devidusky,
a 10 year old students at St. Albert's,
worships her great aunt.
They look in the dream book together to interpret dreams.
They study the butterfly books
that the great aunt has got for her.
They talk about old Polish customs.

"In the garden, butterflies come to meet me then fly on.
"They brush and flutter about my shoulders
"because of them I can't see.
"Then they open a beautiful long tunnel for me
"and I feel their wings as I run through.

"At the end, behind auntie's purple flowers,
"I know there's an empty chair in the house
"and that her dream book is open on the table.
"Crying, I run right through the butterflies now,
"all of them, all of the morning cloak butterflies,
"blue and yellow ones, but they stay right with me
"and come into the house
"where the old Polish ladies are already washing her."
My relatives, my grandparents, parents, and other relatives
were all Roman Catholic Pols.
I was raised in a Catholic home
and went to parochial schools
for the first 12 years of my life.
(speaks in foreign language)
is Polish for St. Albert's School.
My father and mother and sister, Mary,
first lived in an apartment above the Coast To Coast store,
in the business section.
I remember on Friday evenings looking out the window
on East 5th Street and seeing people sauntering
to Aero Cafe or to the Superior Theater.

I like to have a narrowly defined geographical area
in which to exist.
I don't think I would function so well in a big city.
Writing about one small community, maybe seven square miles,

doesn't have to limit a person I think
because the stories in this community are limitless.

Once I get the story down,
then I do like to go over them
and revise them patiently and retype them, time after time.
I don't use a microcomputer.
I use a typewriter
because I think part of the act of creation for me
is a physical act.
I sit down and write long hand
and then transcribe this material with a typewriter
and then I retype the material and over the years
go over and over and over the stories,
retyping them each time,
but I have great energy and enthusiasm for these stories
and I work them and if it takes me eight years,
I don't care.
It doesn't matter just so long as I get it
as good as I can finally craft it into being.

In some of the stories, Durum Wheat, among them,
I call this place the Frederica Flour mill.
It's King Midas.
My father worked here in the 30s and then sailed
and came back here after the war in about 46
and stayed on until he was,
until 1970s when it was,
when his health failed and he had to retire.
This is a part of the East End,
but it's away from the business section.
It's away from our church, well not that far,
you know, three, four blocks away
and is down on the water front,
but it's also an important focus
because of all the hours my dad spent here
and the stories he would return with.

"Cherub Bluebird walks out, and Jesus, if it isn't snowing.
"April, and the ground is white.
"And here is an Indian with white flour on his face
"like a white man,
"walking a path through the stand of aspen,
"where plastic bags and old newspapers catch in the trees.
"Through the snow and early evening light,
"I think I hear him praying.
"I don't know.
"It's hard to see with the swirling snow,
"but Bluebird is praying it sounds like
"and now the dummy runs after him,
"goes right out the mill door after him,
"flour on his face,
"hands talking like he's got something to say to him,
"'Hey, wait!' we call.
"'You forgot your lunch pail.'
"I don't know where the dummy goes,
"maybe away through the trees through the left handed river,
"maybe to follow the creek to its source in the wetlands,
"maybe into the pine barrens as night hushes its footsteps.
"There's land to disappear in out there for an Indian,
"true enough,
"voices from many years ago.
"Maybe by morning, when the mists starts up,
"both will have found something in common.
"After a while, Benny and I have to give up watching
"and go our separate ways home to supper."

- Monthly meeting of the Thaddeus Kosciuszko Lodge
is now called to order.
Ronny, our opening prayer.
- Oh Lord almighty,
who has brought us to the beginning of a new day,
defend us this day by thy power
so that we may not only turn away from all sin,
but also that our every thought, words, and deeds
may proceed from and be directed according to thy will.
May no ill or hard feelings be helped
toward any of our fellow members.
Amen. - [Group] Amen.
- [Ronny] Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen.

- Writing about my father so much
because he was a dominant figure in my life.
Writing about him has allowed me
to understand him better, I think.
Some writers, perhaps all writers,
write fiction maybe partly for its the therapy
that it can provide.
The answers that it can provide a person
about his or her universe.

This is about Augy, a failed minor league baseball player
whose come home to tend bar at Heartbreak Hotel.
"'Whatch you thinking about?'
"one of the guys at the bar asks.
"'Nothing,' I say, 'A girl.'
"'Who?'
"'I'll tell you later.'
"I'm thinking about something, baseball.
"I shake his hand as he slumps against the wall.
"I shake all their hands, my fans.
"The Hamm's Beer clock ticks on.
"The sign sizzles.
"They shuffle to the jukebox, the men's room,
"the Pachinko game to try to roll a nickel
"down the right path.
"'Thanks,' I say to them.
"To Hamm faced Vladju, to Stacho, to Benny.
(speaks in foreign language)
"they say, 'You had a good career in baseball.'
"'Pete, you're pickled.
"'Why don't you go home?
"'Can you walk or should I call you a cab?'
"'You go home,' Pete says.
"'I can't.
"'What would I do?
"'Sit with my ma?
"'Say the rosary with her?
"'Anyway, if I looked in the mirror at home,
"'I'd just see you guys.
"'I might as well stay here
"'where I got you in front of me.'"
(waltz music)

- When I was probably 12 years old,
a friend and I collaborated on little newspaper,
only written I guess for ourselves.
Maybe our parents bought a copy for a penny.
I don't remember, but we found out it was difficult work
to write this newspaper long hand
and then to come up with news for it.
So I think it lasted only two issues.
That might be the first time
I ever tried to create something.
And I remember writing on my own a little newsletter once
about Elvis Presley when he first came out
and showing it to some of the students at St. Albert's
and they seemed amused by it
and maybe that had an influence on me.
Maybe I liked the feeling that I could bring
some pleasure to others from this writing.

The two parochial schools in the East End of Superior,
one has been raised
and the other has be sold and is in shambles.
We had a small stage in ours.
We had no bleacher section
and this has got a backboards
that are made out of metal and curved.
Ours were just hunks of wood tacked up on a wall,
but it worked.
I mean, a lot of good athletes came out of that school.
"'What they staring at us for?'
"the boy with the circles under his eyes says.
"They bounced the ball,
"spy the table with the food and cake for Sister Branislaw.
"The other intruder spits out his gum, puts up a shot.
"The basketball falling through,
"rips the paper decorations hanging from the net.
"It is a long, hopeless, ugly moment
"as they saunter to the table ladened with sweetbreads,
"hot dishes, hams, cheese, pickles, the large white cake.

"'They'll be gone,'
"Josie whispers to Ralph, 'Then there'll be a polonaise.'

"But Ralph is not looking on the bright side.
"The intruders walk past Dela Novatsky,
"Mr. Morjimsky, Mr. Mitskevitch, Mrs. Kosmatka.
"When they past him, the smirking boys do not look at Ralph,
"but through him,
"as though he counts for nothing at all on this Earth.
"That's when he has a vision of the days to come.
"Looking at the other parishioners' faces,
"for a moment he can't see his own reflected,
"not in their glasses, not in their eyes,
"not in their Polish words.
"Suddenly nothing reflects Ralph Slipkowski
"of Superior, Wisconsin.
"It's not his wife's,
"but his thinking about the future that changes now.
"More and more in the coming days,
"he sees in this vision of a world without depth.
"Riots will be tearing cities apart
"and presidents and dignitaries will be seized and put upon.
"It is not Josie's,
"but Ralph Slipkowski's thinking that's changed.
"And now, of all things,
"he's suddenly becoming frightened of looking ahead."

These people walked these streets
and went to that business section
and worshiped at these churches
and smelled the same lilacs that we smell.

They're with us eternally
and we'll eventually take our place with them
and I hope those, the young men and women,
who come after us feel the same way about the neighborhood,
the East End.
It gets a hold on a person, on certain people,
maybe on those who are worthy of it.

(slow, somber melody)