February 11, 2015 - Minnesota author Leif Enger gave the 2015 Heginbotham Literary Lecture Feb. 6th at Concordia University in St. Paul.His best-selling debut novel, "Peace Like a River" was named one of Time magazine's top five books of the year in 2001. Enger was a reporter at Minnesota Public Radio for 20 years.
May 2, 2008 - Minnesota writer Leif Enger's new novel, "So Brave, Young and Handsome," is a tribute to the Western. An old cowboy seeks forgiveness from his estranged wife as he tries to shake a pursuing Pinkerton detective. And the book's narrator is a writer attempting to match the success of his first book. Enger's first novel, "Peace Like a River," was a best-seller.
July 6, 2000 - Intro: Old-growth timber is making a comeback. Not just as an environmental issue this time, but as wood - as polished floors and cathedral ceilings. The timber-salvage industry has taken off in Minnesota - saving old beams from condemned warehouses, pulling old logs from lake bottoms, and spicing new architecture with antique woods. Leif Enger of Mainstreet Radio reports.
June 27, 2000 - Intro: The neighboring cities of Brainerd and Baxter - joined at the hip in central Minnesota lake country - are wrestling over territory. Specifically, the commercially promising land along state highway 371 to the north. Each city says it needs the property to continue growing economically; each has submitted an annexation proposal to the state. Meantime, the people who live in the disputed area say they just want to be left alone. Mainstreet Radio's Leif Enger reports.
May 24, 2000 - Mainstreet Radio's Leif Enger reports that on the Rainy River, the border between Minnesota and Canada, lake sturgeon is rising. Surviving near obliteration by commercial fishing and polluting paper mills, the sturgeon has resurfaced as a gamefish of almost mythical power. With the coming of summer, anglers by the hundreds of thousands are stalking Minnesota's lakes and rivers. Their objective, almost always, are walleye, northern pike, panfish and trout. Yet for a few anglers, a walleye holds no attraction; a twenty-pound northern, no allure; a rainbow trout, no romance…but lake sturgeon is a different matter.
March 24, 2000 - MPR’s Leif Enger presents various commentary from tribal members during treaty holiday celebration.
January 19, 2000 - As the population ages, short-term memory loss and dementia are becoming more common. Four million Americans now suffer from Alzheimers Disease. Most of those who can no longer live at home are in nursing homes; but many say there's a lack of facilities that understand how to care for dementia victims. In Meeker County, where 17 percent of the population is over 65, an entrepreneur has risked everything to start an innovative foster home for Alzheimer patients. The home, in rural Darwin, features aspects of farm life and could become a model for the future.
January 5, 2000 - Intro: The cost of fishing and hunting may go up in 2000. The Department of Natural Resources wants to raise license fees, a crucial revenue source in its budget; the DNR says if the legislature doesn't do so, Minnesota's outdoors will suffer. Mainstreet Radio's Leif Enger reports. In 1949, Minnesota had 147 game wardens. And says Brainerd enforcement supervisor Tom Provost -- that's actually what they were. Provost: "Ninety percent of what we did then we strictly game and fish enforcement. We were the game warden. We were checking fishermen and trappers, hunters, that was what we did."
December 20, 1999 - Mainstreet Radio's Leif Enger shipped aboard a Bulgarian tramp freighter as it departed for Italy with a load of North Dakota wheat. As the last ship of the season departed Duluth early in the morning, the St. Lawrence Seaway's 40th season draws to a close.
December 8, 1999 - Mainstreet Radios Leif Enger reports from Pierz, where more than half the employees of a small nursing home in the central Minnesota community have been on strike for weeks. At issue - How to divide a wage-and-benefit increase granted by the state.