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KAREN BARTA: Good morning. I'm Karen Barta with news from Minnesota Public Radio. A new state report says Minnesota's Wetland Conservation Act probably hasn't achieved what it set out to accomplish. The goal was to create no net loss of wetlands in the state. But at the same time, the report says the state might be holding the line against further serious losses.

Mediation resumes today on the management of Voyageurs National Park. Some negotiators are concerned with the National Park Service's decision to proceed with the controversial snowmobile restriction without waiting for mediators to consider the issue. The park intends to keep snowmobiles off lake bays where wolves feed. The issue has been discussed in a proposal before the mediation panel. Mediator Jeff Mosoph says it's difficult to negotiate when the Park Service proceeds with the restrictions outside the mediation process.

JEFF MOSOPH: The timing of the announcement of the proposed bay closures was, I guess, poor to say the least. It's a very genuine concern of ours and of all of our people that is hanging over the whole mediation process as a Black cloud right now.

KAREN BARTA: Voyagers mediators will meet in the Twin Cities today and Tuesday. Some grocery stores in poor neighborhoods in Minnesota could suffer great losses in the coming months. That's when nearly 20,000 Minnesotans will be cut off from food stamps under the new federal welfare law.

The state forecast today cloudy. There is a chance of light snow or light freezing rain in the north. Highs from the upper 20s in the northeast to upper seconds in the southwest. For the Twin Cities cloudy with a high around 30. Skies are cloudy around the region this hour. In Rochester, it's 19 degrees. Duluth reporting 18. It's 20 St. Cloud and 22 in the Twin Cities. That's news from Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Karen Barta.

CATHERINE WINTER: It's 10:06 o'clock, and you're listening to Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Catherine Winter. Paul Schroeder returns tomorrow.

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Barb Frey says a visit to Chile after the military there had taken democracy away from the people convinced her to become a human rights advocate. Today, on our Voices of Minnesota interview, we'll hear Frey talk about her work.

This month, Frey leaves her job as executive director of the Minnesota advocates for human rights. Every year, hundreds of attorneys and other volunteers donate their time to take on human rights cases here and abroad. For Minnesota advocates. The 13-year-old Minneapolis-based group has won an international reputation for its work.

Frey is a native of Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, and she's a law school graduate. Right after law school, in 1983, Frey visited Chile, where 10 years earlier, military leaders had overthrown the country's elected government. Frey talked recently with Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: What was the impact on a young law student just out of law school going to a country which had, as you say, a decade earlier, lost its democratic standing?

BARB FREY: What was compelling to me was not just seeing the soldiers in the streets with their submachine guns. That's a shocking sight. But understanding how similar Chile had been to our own democracy in the United States, and how shocking it was that a democracy could be overturned by military rule. And what it made me understand was how fragile democracy is, how fragile rights are, and how easily people are coerced into giving up their rights.

I can remember, it was very poignant experience. It probably was the most-- in terms of human rights as opposed to larger social justice or poverty issues, it was the most life-shaping experience I had.

Two things strike me. One was a meeting I had with a woman who was a human rights attorney in the Catholic Church Human Rights Agency, which was called the vicaria de la Solidaridad. And this woman, I was just observing. And so I got a chance to interview various people. And I asked her what made her do this work?

And her husband, just a couple of years earlier, had been taken out and executed in cold blood by the military as a suspicious figure. And I just looked at her, telling me that story. And it was so unreal that she had lived through that experience. And you could see the personal sacrifice in her eyes in what she was doing.

The other experience that was really important was working with a neighborhood group in one of the poorest neighborhoods, the Poblacion, as they call them, that surround the City of Santiago, and getting to know people, on very intimate basis, who lived in these unbelievable conditions of basically no heat, in a shanty town.

And they were so poor that they joined together in what they called "ollas comunes," which are common pots. They would eat their main meal together, and somebody would bring carrots, and somebody would bring onions. And they'd throw it all in the pot. And that's how they got by.

They accepted me so openly, even though I felt like somewhat of a voyeur. But I really came to understand much more clearly what it felt like to live at the bottom of oppressed society. And I don't know that those people's lives have gotten terribly better under the democracy. I think the economy is what has affected them.

But they had no rights. I mean, the military could come in and do whatever they wanted, and there was no one there to defend them.

DAN OLSON: Well, you could have hooked up with any number of human rights organizations in the world, in the country. And eventually, you chose to hook up with one of your own, founding Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. Why Minnesota Advocates when there are really several others doing similar kinds of work?

BARBABARA FREY: When I started in this work, there were not very many jobs in international human rights. This field is very, very new. Amnesty International is the granddad of human rights organizations. And it's only 30 years old.

So Minnesota Advocates started in-- I went to my first meeting in June of 1983, and I had just moved back to town in January of '83 after being in Chile. And I was working at a law firm here. I had accepted a job with a law firm. It was a great security to me to know I could travel for a long time and then defer starting at a firm. So I came back. And I was working at this firm and heard that this organization was being formed. And I was very excited that this was right in the area in which I was interested.

DAN OLSON: And then to jump ahead 13 years, the organization now has how many programs underway and how many different parts of the world doing how many different things?

BARBABARA FREY: Well, sometimes it's hard to quantify. We have about 15 major programs. They run the gamut from representing asylum applicants here in the United States to teaching students to investigating human rights abuses in different parts of the world.

So it's very multifaceted organization under one umbrella. We are a membership-based organization. We've always been grassroots, and that's what has really made our reputation and allowed us to do a huge amount of work on a very small budget.

DAN OLSON: You have some volunteer attorneys working with death row inmates in Southern states, is that right?

BARBABARA FREY: That's correct. We have about 25 clients on death row.

DAN OLSON: Because apparently, your organization feels that, among other weak links in the chain of justice for people facing murder charges, is their defense in the courtroom.

BARBABARA FREY: Yeah, it's the primary weak link. The only people you'll find on death row in the United States are poor. Only people who are poor are put to death.

DAN OLSON: You oppose the death penalty.

BARBABARA FREY: We do. I do personally. And institutionally, we adopted a resolution in 1992 opposing the death penalty.

DAN OLSON: How poor is the representation of some of the people who are accused of murder?

BARBABARA FREY: Well, we have amazing stories of people who have court-appointed attorneys who are so inebriated that the judge will call off the hearing, send the court-appointed attorney to sober up in jail, and the next morning start up the trial again, bring out the defendant in shackles and his lawyer from the same jail in to defend him.

We have cases, many cases. There was one that the Fredrikson & Byron firm just won in Louisiana on appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court in which the attorney-- usually, these are young, inexperienced attorneys. And these capital cases are very complex. This attorney didn't call a single witness in the sentencing portion of the trial.

So his client was convicted of murder. There was not-- there wasn't an indication that he didn't commit the murder. But he was mentally retarded; had had, of course, serious abuse in his past. All sorts of witnesses you could bring on his defense not to keep him out of jail, but to keep him from being killed for his crime. And the lawyer didn't call a single witness, didn't investigate a single witness on his behalf. And so those are the kind of cases that we're most interested in defending.

SPEAKER: Barbara Frey, this month marks the end of her 13 years as director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. This is Midmorning from Minnesota Public Radio. And we're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview. Programming on Minnesota Public Radio is supported by 3M, who generously matched more than 900 employee contributions to Minnesota Public Radio.

Let's return to Barb Frey's conversation with Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Among your other projects, Minnesota Advocates has gone to, as you describe them, so-called closed countries, countries where people from outside were not allowed in to view what was going on in courtrooms-- Albania, Saudi Arabia, you've mentioned North Korea, others. What's the nature of what's going on, or what went on in these closed countries? What was the treatment?

BARBABARA FREY: You have a set of countries where there is no check on power. People in power are the old adage that absolute power corrupts absolutely. And that's what you find in countries where there is no check within the country, and there is certainly no international check on what's going on.

So you had three different situations-- North Korea with a dictator who had been in power for decades and who had a cult of personality beyond anything that we've probably seen on the planet for a while; Saudi Arabia with a king who basically appointed every government-- appoints every government official. So everyone is beholden to the king; and Albania, again, a decades' old ruler who then died and transferred power to his appointed ruler.

And what you find is gulags filled with opposition to anyone who looks cross-eyed at a person, anyone who offends them personally. It doesn't even have to be a political case. It's people who personally are dissatisfying to the ruler.

You find corruption beyond belief. You find interpretation of cultural norms in a way that affects entire groups of people. In Saudi Arabia, for instance, the king utilizes the sharia, wields the sharia in a way that completely dominates women.

DAN OLSON: These are the religious police.

BARBABARA FREY: That's right-- well, no, the sharia is the entire body of Islamic law. But as I say, sort of uses that as an excuse for perpetrating really serious abuses against the women in the country.

DAN OLSON: What does opening the door and shedding international light on these countries do? Does it, in your opinion, have much impact after 13 years of this kind of work?

BARBABARA FREY: Really, the whole basis of international human rights activism is moral pressure. It's the greatest tool we have. People are people. They don't like to be criticized. They don't like to be called murderers and torturers.

And we find that the bottom line is that that helps us in almost every case. In these closed societies, part of the reason they want to keep the society closed is to avoid criticism. It's to avoid people really understanding the tower of cards upon which their power is built. And so we-- in all of our work, the bottom line tends to be that kind of moral shame.

DAN OLSON: You've given awards through your organization to a range of people to illustrate conditions around the world. Once you brought-- I think her name is Dr. Shana Swiss from Boston to Minnesota for an award. And she had been looking for years, apparently, at the use of rape as a tool during war. And her work is important. Why?

BARBABARA FREY: It's been known that the use of systematic rape has been a tool of war throughout the ages. I mean, you read any history of war, and you understand that the pillage and rape just went along with the territory. But it's only been in recent years that systematic rape has been defined as a war crime.

In Nuremberg, systematic rape was defined as a war crime, but the prosecutors chose not to prosecute it. There was kind of a strange sense that it would be too shocking, almost, more shocking than genocide to have testimony in open international court on the use of rape.

What has been the silver lining in the awful genocides that we have seen in this decade has been an international movement to say, enough is enough. Rape is not a minor crime. It is a major crime in the category of war crimes going along with genocide, torture, mutilation.

And there is now a body of law that is developing within the war crimes tribunal to look at the crime of rape. And Shana Swiss was really one of the pioneers of that.

DAN OLSON: Another person who won an award, I don't know the name of this individual, was apparently trying to organize children, abandoned children or children with parents who had sent them out into the streets and plazas of Rio de Janeiro. And then the police had come along. I think fairly recently within the past few years, these cases have been publicized and gunned down, murdered the children. What's the story behind this? And why is it important to bring this to light? Obviously, we know why it's important to bring it to light, but what's been the effect of bringing it to light?

BARBABARA FREY: There are millions of children living in developing countries and developed countries, unfortunately, who are abandoned by their families and are forced to live on the streets. And they, of course, have to get by in whatever manner that they can through stealing or prostitution. And you can imagine the psyches of these children who are surviving physically, but very much suffering mentally. And they take up drugs on the street and sniff glue and do anything that they can to get rid of the pain.

Brazil was one of the places that had the most serious problem with street children. The street children are seen as a nuisance. You can imagine how we treat our children who walk around the mall of America in gangs. You can imagine if there are a group of fairly intimidating looking or bothersome looking poor children who you know are going to steal from your store.

So in many of these places, the shop owners work in conjunction with the paramilitary, not necessarily the military, but private thugs who have open license to kill. They call it cleansing. Instead of ethnic cleansing, it's cleansing of undesirables.

And there have been instances, where literally, like in Brazil, where these paramilitary will get out, and they'll just gun down a group of sleeping children. This has happened in more than one place. And we find stories of this probably surfacing the most in Central America-- I mean, not-- Central and Latin America.

But this is a situation that exists worldwide. In Asia, there's a serious child prostitution problem. And there, of course, are child labor issues all over the developing world. And children's rights is one of those new frontiers that human rights activists are beginning to take steps to fight against.

CATHERINE WINTER: You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota conversation with Barb Frey, the outgoing director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. This is Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. Barb Frey is very concerned about human rights in China.

Western companies fearing adverse reaction from China have lobbied the US government to tone down criticism of China's human rights abuses. The Disney Company said recently it'll continue making a film about the Dalai Lama, even after China had asked Disney to stop. China is worried about how foreigners view its repression of Tibetans. Let's return to the conversation with Barb Frey.

DAN OLSON: I think a lot of people were shocked at Harry Wu's appearance at Northrop Auditorium a few years ago at the University of Minnesota to hear his personal, his firsthand account of being a prisoner in the Chinese system of forced labor camps. You were in that audience listening to him as well. Is there any sign that anything that insiders or outsiders are saying about China's human rights is having much of an impact on China? Or is it instead hardening the resolve of Chinese leaders to just thumb their nose at the international community and just charge forward with their rapidly expanding economy?

BARBABARA FREY: China is a place where we see all of the various interests and complexity of international relations taking place. China does not act with one mind, and that's important in understanding what goes on there so that there are certain people who really see it in their interest to make the West out as the enemy. And they take great delight in imprisoning and punishing people who they see as dangerous elements who speak out for democracy.

I don't think anybody is interested in just banging China over the head constantly about human rights. We understand that the relationship is a complex one that involves trade, commerce, international security issues, women's issues, et cetera, et cetera. But what is disturbing to us is to see human rights take such a back seat to commercial interests. And it gave me some degree of pleasure to see Disney have to wring its hands and cope firsthand with this issue of China trying to leverage its huge commercial power to cut off the free speech of a first-world company.

And what I think that the business community has to realize is that right now, we have some sort of leverage, because we do have economic-- we do have economic strengths that China doesn't have right now. But I want them to look down the road 20 years to when China has really overtaken the world in terms of economic prowess and see how it would feel to have China impose its moral standards on the West.

DAN OLSON: The strategy has been over the past couple of administrations in our US government this idea of constructivism engagement, or let's do business with them and hope that human rights gets better in China, specifically, maybe in most other countries too, for all I know. Are there results to show that that's working?

BARBABARA FREY: Well, absolutely not. Clinton has gotten rid of every piece of leverage that we've had. We initially linked most favored nation's trading status to the human rights record. And he was lobbied heavily by the business lobby who said this was destructive, it was bad for the relationship. You hear these echoes of the same arguments that business had about South Africa 25 years ago, which is, just allow us to do business in this country and they will see the wisdom of our cultural ways. If we only have plants and we can hire people fairly and treat them decently, then our standards will multiply throughout the land.

Well, this is hogwash. The people in South Africa finally told us, you've got to get out and help us to get rid of the economic and political dominance of this apartheid system. And once we did, we've seen the flourishing of democracy and a country of many voices and many colors in South Africa.

How artificial it is of us to believe that simply by allowing China to have the gift of exposure to West and the Western ideals, that suddenly, we're going to change their cultural values. I don't necessarily believe that most favored nations or trade levers are the only arrow in our quiver that is going to work. I think we have to have a many pronged strategy, but I have not seen this administration be sincere in its efforts to promote the rights of Chinese democracy advocates.

DAN OLSON: I guess the argument, part of it is that as economies expand, whether it be China, Chile, Albania, you name it, people will become more democratically oriented. They'll get education. Women will be more educated. Services will expand. People will start feeling the good life, start getting the good life and thinking, wow, we don't want to give this up. And moreover, we want more. And as a result, the connection is made, and human rights will improve. Do you buy that analysis?

BARBABARA FREY: Well, we're going to see an interesting-- we're going to see an interesting example of how that works in 1997, when Hong Kong goes back to China, which is a country that has gone through that process that you described, improved its economic status, has a thriving democratic community. And I am sorry to have to predict that we're going to see some serious human rights violations. We're already seeing indications of them regarding Hong Kong going back to China.

Now you can say, well, certainly, when the Chinese middle class develops to the level where they can understand and participate in democracy. But we've seen examples of where there's been a very strong economy that's developed and rights have not accompanied it. I would not like to be a citizen of Singapore. I would not like to be a citizen of Indonesia.

And I just think it's, again, self-serving for us to believe that somehow our investment dollars and bringing McDonald's to Beijing and to other places that have less than democratic rule is going to suddenly open people's eyes and make them strong participants in a democratic system.

DAN OLSON: Barbara Frey, thanks a lot for talking with us. I appreciate it.

BARBABARA FREY: Thanks, Dan. Always a pleasure.

CATHERINE WINTER: Barb Frey, this month, she leaves her job as director of Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. Our Voices of Minnesota interviews are heard nearly every Monday at this time. The producer for the series is Dan Olson.

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Today's programming is sponsored in part by Ishmael, who asks, with the gorilla gone, will there be hope for man? The time is 10:30.

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RAY SUAREZ: I'm Ray Suarez. The wait is over. Thursday, President Clinton named a new national security team to be headed by Madeleine Albright. So what's next with trouble brewing in Bosnia, the Middle East, North Korea, and Central Africa, the new group has some big hurdles ahead. A look at the future of American foreign policy next on Talk of the Nation from NPR News.

CATHERINE WINTER: You're listening to Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Catherine Winter, sitting in for Paula Schroeder, who returns tomorrow. People in International Falls still have vivid memories of the labor dispute that exploded there in 1989. Union workers at the Boise Cascade paper mill launched a Wildcat strike when the mill hired a non-union contractor to build a huge expansion on the plant. Tensions ran high in the town for months. Cars and homes were vandalized. Finally, a mob descended on temporary housing set up for the non-union workers, ransacking and burning the trailers.

Author Mary Casanova bases her new book, Riot, on the 1989 rampage. Like her previous book, Moose Tracks, Riot is aimed at young readers. I asked her why she wanted to write about the labor dispute.

MARY CASANOVA: Well, Riot was a story that I knew I had to write simply because as a writer, having lived through an actual riot, it was something I had to work out and try and make sense of the unthinkable. Since I write for kids, it was easy to then step in the eyes and the viewpoint of a 12-year-old character and write through the eyes of Bryan, this 12-year-old who lives in a town where a riot takes place.

CATHERINE WINTER: Were you actually there in International Falls when the labor dispute took place in the late 1980s or early '90s?

MARY CASANOVA: I lived there during that time. It was really about a two-year seething labor dispute. And I was there the day that the riot actually broke out. A friend of mine called me from across the river in Canada. And she said, Mary, what's going on over there, there's a mushroom cloud of smoke above your town, is your whole town on fire or what? And my husband and I flipped on the radio.

And the mayor was on the radio saying, don't go into town today, there's a mob hundreds of men strong-- there were really 500 to 600 men-- rolling through the streets of town, stay home, be safe. And that was the most chilling day that I have ever lived through, because it was the day where I felt suddenly like I had no freedom, no civil liberties. Really couldn't even go into town to go shopping because out of a fear for the safety of my children and myself.

CATHERINE WINTER: Did you know people who were involved in the labor dispute?

MARY CASANOVA: I didn't know anyone at that time who actually was crossing the lines into this housing camp, which they torched-- where they torched mobile homes that housed these non-union workers. I did know some of the law enforcement. I knew families who had family members involved. In some cases, there were families who were pitted on either side of the issue.

And maybe that's where I came up with this plot of a main character whose parents are on either side of the issue, a father who is increasingly involved in the violence, thinking that he is standing up for his rights as a union worker and protesting the work at the paper project that he didn't get. And his mother is a union member, but she's a teacher and believes in peaceable means of solving problems and standing up for her rights. Bryan's this kid in the middle, not only in the middle of a family that's torn apart and divided on the issues, but also in the midst of a community where there's increasing vandalism and violence at every turn.

It took me a while to find out how can I get at a story that kids could understand. And yet, I felt compelled to handle or make sense of this whole problem of violence in a way that kids could grapple with an issue like this, because they're surrounded by it as well. And it wasn't just the adults that were affected in my community, nor is it just the adults that are affected in the community like Saint Petersburg or LA, where a riot erupts, that kids are present in the midst of that.

And if I could in some way help kids to think about issues of violence and anger, then maybe I can make something good come out of what was a really difficult thing to live through.

CATHERINE WINTER: Would you be willing to read us just a little bit from the book?

MARY CASANOVA: Sure, absolutely. I'd like to read from just the opening. It's a small and short prologue. And again, this is through the eyes of a 12-year-old Bryan Grant.

"Weeds poke up through the gravel-covered field. And the rows of yellow mobile homes are gone. It's been a year since everything broke loose, since black clouds of putrid smoke chugged into the sky, defying the efforts of firefighters. I bike here often, turning it all over in my mind, replaying the events like a videotape, forcing myself to remember. Remembering helps me to understand, not only what happened to our town, but to me."

CATHERINE WINTER: It is years later now. Is this still very much alive in the minds of people in the International Falls area?

MARY CASANOVA: Well, it's amazing to me that it's been a very mute topic. People simply stop talking. And they didn't talk in large part during this whole issue because it was neighbor against neighbor, finding that they were on either side of a very hot issue. And after the riot, I think our town was so stunned and in many ways scarred. And people didn't talk about it.

So it seemed it was very risky for me to take on a topic and still live in a community in which it was a volatile subject. But having written it now, I'm feeling and I'm sensing that many community members where I live are talking about what happened, where were they when it happened, reliving some of those events, and opening up some dialogue.

In fact, one of the very-- one of the most helpful comments I received was from a mental health worker who said to me-- well, I was wondering about how this book would do in our community. And he said, Mary, this could be a good thing, it might be like holding up a mirror for our community and saying, look, this happened, let's face it, let's deal with it. And I have to hope that by dealing with it, we're able to move on and maybe prevent something like this from happening again.

CATHERINE WINTER: But that's risky, too, isn't it? I mean, you end up having to portray people who really did get involved in this and who really were on two very opposite sides. Have you had anyone suggest to you that your portrayal was not fair? Or has anyone been angry about it?

MARY CASANOVA: Oh, I have to say, I was pretty nervous during the time I was writing this. And I did get some comments from individuals that said, you can write this, but there's some talk in the town that if you write this book, people may not go to your husband's business. And that was a rather sobering reality that I was taking a risk in writing this book.

Fortunately, I'm married to a person who said, let's go for freedom of speech and see what happens. And so I appreciated that my husband was supportive, because it was a book I needed to write. But I also knew I was taking on some risks in doing it.

But by now, I'm starting to get a little bit of feedback from my community. And I think the most telling comment was from someone who her husband was involved in the actual riot. And she said, he's said now that when he looks back, he thought he was doing the right thing. But if he had the chance to do it over again, it wouldn't have gone so far.

And I think that's the main point I make in the book, that there are a lot of people trying to do what they thought was the right thing at that time. But when you're in the middle of such a heated controversy and people fighting for their livelihood, that people slip into a mob mentality. And anger can go unchecked. And that's what happened.

CATHERINE WINTER: Bryan's father even says what you've just said, I never thought it would go this far.

MARY CASANOVA: Right, and I guess that was my trying to struggle with how-- I had to try and understand how could people go this far in acts of violence. It's amazing that nobody got killed, that blood wasn't shed in our community. Pretty miraculous, actually.

And yet, I had to try and step into the viewpoint of those people who were actually involved in the vandalism. And I really believe they thought they were doing the right thing, a heroic and noble thing at the time, trying to stand up for the rights of workers. And that is a noble thing.

But when it crosses into violence, I think most people in our community would still say it went too far. And there was a point at which there were signs up in a lot of business windows, including my husband's, that said, local jobs for local workers. And it sounded good until things got to the point of a riot. And at that point, all these signs started to come down because people couldn't support it to that degree.

CATHERINE WINTER: What sort of a business does your husband run?

MARY CASANOVA: He's in an insurance business. So he was in the middle, like a lot of businesses on main street, having people from either side of the issue step in and give them their opinion. And trying to walk a middle ground was a very difficult tightrope to walk during that time for our community. In fact, we had-- I don't know if people understand just how tense it was, and maybe that's why I needed to write this book.

At one point, the manager of the newsroom, the newspaper office, was sleeping in a sleeping bag with a rifle next to him to protect the newsroom from being vandalized, simply because he was covering events as they happened. One radio reporter told me afterwards, he said, I was at the riot, and I was covering it, and I didn't realize until after I heard myself on tape that I was weeping the whole time that I was covering it.

We had tourists coming into town with out-of-town license plates. Their windows were being bashed in. Car tires were being slit, simply because many people thought that-- they assumed that they were part of the influx of non-union workers from outside of our area.

So it was like being in a war-torn community. And this is a community that is generally like any other peaceful small town community in Minnesota or in other parts of the country. But all of a sudden, things changed. And it became explosive.

CATHERINE WINTER: I was really interested in your choice of writing about it from the viewpoint of a boy. And your previous book, Moose Tracks, also is from the perspective of a boy. Do you find it easier to write from the persona of a boy than from a girl?

MARY CASANOVA: Well, I do have a novel that's written through the viewpoint of a girl. I haven't sold that one yet, but I think it just comes-- it comes easily to me to write through the viewpoint of a boy because I grew up with seven brothers and a couple of sisters, a big family, and spent a lot of time with boys. I think I also have a heart for boys. I see a lot of boys that slip through the cracks as readers.

The fact is, girls tend to read more than boys. And my son is 11, and I know that it's difficult as a parent to find books that he'll be excited about besides Goosebumps. And I want my own child to read something with more meat. But I also recognize that most boys are very active. Most kids are really active these days, and they need something where they can turn the pages pretty quickly and be hooked into the story. So I feel this need to write stories that both matter but also stories that kids and boys, in particular, won't put down so that I don't lose them.

CATHERINE WINTER: This book definitely starts right in the middle. I mean, it doesn't start with a slow buildup to the action. The dispute is already occurring when the book starts.

MARY CASANOVA: And so often people think it's easy to write for kids. And it just requires such tight writing. And I know that I have to hook them on that first half a page, the first two pages. Or they're going to put the book down. They don't care how many good reviews the book might have gotten. They're going to be looking at whether or not they're hooked by the story immediately or not. So I spend probably 50% of my time writing a book goes into that first and second chapter to make sure it's moving quickly.

CATHERINE WINTER: I was interested, too, in the use of the conflict between the two parents as a vehicle for showing the two sides of the issue. But it struck me in part because I recently read Will Weaver's new books for kids, and he also has a parental dispute in his main characters. And the father ends up in jail, just as the father in your book does. And I wonder if new literature for kids is reflecting some big changes in society.

MARY CASANOVA: Well, I think that it's pretty tough as an author not to reflect what's happening in society, especially if you're writing a book that's fairly-- it's contemporary. And it's also pretty natural as a children's author to write about family, because a 12-year-old is still pretty engaged in family. And you can try and move a parent off the scene in a plot. But still, that kid is going to be pretty affected by one parent or another.

CATHERINE WINTER: In your first book, Moose Tracks, I believe it's the only book targeted at young readers that I've ever read where the protagonist was conceived out of wedlock. Was that a risky thing to write about?

MARY CASANOVA: In some ways, I worried that I was following a trend. I thought maybe everybody's writing about this. But at the time, I had a nephew that I felt-- I was thinking about him. And he's trying to adjust in some ways to having a step-dad and his need to feel part of a blended family.

CATHERINE WINTER: You're currently working on a book about wolves, is that correct?

MARY CASANOVA: Right, I'm living in Northern Minnesota. Like so many other Minnesotans, I just have a fascination with wolves. I can't believe how many wolves I've seen in the last five years. I think they're either becoming more comfortable with people, or they're it just is an exploding population.

But I also find that there are so many people who really hate wolves. Every time I turn around, I'm hearing a conversation at a cafe or hearing somebody talk about, gee, if they saw a wolf, they'd just shoot it, and those are our deer out there. The wolf issue is one that I've wanted to write about, and I wasn't sure what story would be the best way to tackle that issue.

But it looks like it's going to come out as a sequel to Moose Tracks. And so it'll follow the story of Seth again as he's trying to nurse along the health of a orphaned moose calf. And there's an increasing wolf population. And what kinds of problems does that pose? So that's been a fun one for me to write, and it'll be out next fall.

CATHERINE WINTER: You are not picking safe subjects.

MARY CASANOVA: No, in fact, I had one experience recently where I actually experienced censorship. And it was-- I was doing-- I was going to be going out to North Dakota. And Moose Tracks is up for a Flicker Tale Award, their children's award. And one school read Moose Tracks, and said, gee, I don't think we can have you come out.

And one of the reasons was that it was a homeschooled character, and this was a public school. And it was one of my first experiences with censorship because I thought, I don't know if it matters what topic you pick. Unless you're writing something that is just so bland, you're going to open yourself up to risk. And by picking controversial topics, I know I'm taking on a little more risk, but those seem to be the topics I'm drawn to.

CATHERINE WINTER: It didn't even occur to me when I read Moose Tracks that anyone would object to the homeschooling of the character. I mean, you can point to so many other things that are so much more controversial in what you've written.

MARY CASANOVA: I was amazed. I think that censorship just seems to come up in surprising places.

CATHERINE WINTER: In Riot, the character of the father is obviously struggling with anger. He coached the boy's hockey team and even then sometimes would be explosive and inappropriate with his anger. What were you trying to bring out by writing about that?

MARY CASANOVA: Well, on a larger scale, I saw this Riot happen. And so that was looking at what happens when anger goes unchecked to that degree. But yet, I had to follow that path of anger back as I was writing the story and trying to figure out, for one, how did this father get to that point. But how does Bryan, as a boy, at 12 year old, make sense of anger?

And he starts out feeling angry, siding with his father, angry about some of the same issues his father is angry about. But he doesn't know what to do with that anger. So at one point, he's with his buddy, and he throws rocks at a guard house of this non-union housing camp and later has to start wondering about his own behavior.

I'm hoping that parents or educators might read this type of a story with younger readers and say, let's talk about this. What do we do when we're angry? Do we just haul off and smack our brother or sister? Do we punch somebody? Or is there a better way to deal with this?

And I think of a novel because it's fictitious. It makes an easy avenue for kids to identify with the character and then say, oh, well, Bryan handled it this way. Here's where he blew it, but here's where he learned that maybe instead of becoming violent and acting on that anger, instead, he could go for a walk or he could talk to his mom or he could do something besides acting on it. And I think if I can get kids to see that anger, it's symptomatic of something else going on, but it's a choice as to what they do with it, then the book has some value beyond just being entertaining.

And I spend so many hours writing. I don't want to just write and spend my life at a computer only to publish books and sell books. But I have to believe that I'm meant to convey something of more importance, and I want my stories to matter. And I think this whole anger issue is one that kids, they don't get it. And just talking to them once about it isn't enough. They have to have a chance to think about their behavior before they're ever going to change it. And a book seems to be a easy vehicle for shaping behavior in some ways that might be positive.

CATHERINE WINTER: Do you run your work past your own kids?

MARY CASANOVA: Absolutely, my kids are my best editors because they'll let me know if a line of dialogue doesn't run ring true. And they'll say, oh, mom, kids wouldn't say it that way. And they are my frontline editors. And my husband is a good editor, too. Once I found that he was saying a lot of the same things as my New York editor was saying, then I started to trust his judgment a little bit more.

CATHERINE WINTER: So have you been able to use this work as a vehicle for talking about those issues with your own kids?

MARY CASANOVA: With my own kids and in classrooms when I've done some artist in residencies at schools and to be able to use it then as a springboard for discussion. And I find that that's been really helpful. Because the first reaction is, what do you do when you're angry?

Well, they usually get in a fight if we're talking about siblings when you bring it to the home level, which is where I think we really learn how to behave and how to deal with our feelings. Very often, we're taking it out on each other rather than stopping to think and think about some other alternatives.

CATHERINE WINTER: The point that Riot ends, all the wounds are still wide open in the town, and Bryan's father is in jail awaiting some kind of resolution of his case, are you thinking about a sequel? Or did you leave it open like that on purpose?

MARY CASANOVA: I'm not thinking of a sequel at this point. That's the first question I always get from kids. Well, write the next story. And in my mind, maybe because after living through this incident, after now seven years have passed and things are still raw, if you get into discussions with people about this whole subject, it wasn't easy.

I really did not want to try and wrap things up neatly because you can't wrap things up neatly after a labor dispute like that. People's opinions haven't necessarily changed. It may take years for people to try-- years for people like me to try and figure out even how to make sense of something like that.

So even though it was tempting to want to finish it up and put a bow on the book when I was done with it, I resisted that. And the last line is, some things take time, and I think that's exactly what's happened in my community. And fortunately, with time, with seven years passing, I do see healing coming about. But it's taken some time.

CATHERINE WINTER: And you find that that's what kids who read it want? They want they want some sort of a-- everything to be all better in the end?

MARY CASANOVA: I think so. I think that's a natural reaction for a lot of us. I mean, I think one of the reasons I write for kids is I like happy endings. But as long as there's more hope than despair at the end, I feel like that's happy enough. And the ending is hopeful. I think it's hopeful that this family will pull things back together.

That's one of the points, I guess, I was hoping to make was that families have conflict. Conflict is inevitable, but families can get through some of the most difficult conflict, including something like a riot.

CATHERINE WINTER: Mary Casanova's new book, Riot, is published by Hyperion Books for Children.

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GARY EICHTEN: Oklahoma Congressman JC Watts is one of the Republican Party's rising stars, a former college football hero and Baptist minister who's emerged as a leading African-American conservative voice. JC Watts argues that personal responsibility and religious faith, not government programs, are the keys to improving the lives of Black Americans. He'll be speaking at the Minnesota meeting. And you can hear live coverage on Midday. Gary Eichten here. And I hope you can join us. Midday begins each weekday morning at 11:00 on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM 91.1 in the Twin Cities.

CATHERINE WINTER: And during the 11 o'clock hour of Midday, Gary talks about what goes into a search for a university president with a member of the advisory committee. We'll also hear about a joint effort by Senator Paul Wellstone and Reform Party Senatorial Candidate Dean Barkley on campaign finance reform. And political reporter Karen Louise Boothe looks at the role of women in the 1996 election and the formation of public policy.

Across the state, it looks like the weather will be a bit warmer this week, but it will be dreary in the Southern half of Minnesota. Skies will be cloudy around the state today, and we may see some light snow or freezing drizzle in Bemidji and Brainerd. There's a chance of light snow in Duluth and on the North Shore. St. Cloud has a chance of freezing drizzle. And now it's time for the Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

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GARRISON KEILLOR: And here is the Writer's Almanac for Monday. It's the 9th of December, 1996. John Milton was born in London on this day in 1608, who was writing poetry in English and Latin and Italian by the time he went off to Cambridge University. He wrote a series of pamphlets on civil and religious freedom, important in his day. He went blind in 1652, after which he wrote his great masterpieces, "Paradise Lost" and "Samson Agonistes."

It's the birthday of Grace Brewster Murray Hopper in New York City, 1906. She devised some of the first computer programs working for the Navy during World War II and after the war. She was the one who coined the term "bug" for mysterious computer failures.

The first Christmas seals went on sale on this day in 1907 in Wilmington, Delaware, to raise money for the campaign against tuberculosis. It's the birthday in 1926 in Boston, Massachusetts, of the American physicist Henry W. Kendall. He was teaching at Stanford, where he collaborated with his colleagues Jerome Friedman and Richard Taylor on a new linear particle accelerator, which enabled them to study subatomic particles in greater detail and, thus, discovered the first evidence to confirm the existence of the particles known as quarks.

And it's the birthday in 1920 9 inches New York City of actor and film director John Cassavetes, who acted in successful commercial films such as Rosemary's Baby to finance the films that he directed, such as Minnie and Moskowitz, Big Trouble, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

A poem by William Matthews entitled "Schoolboys with Dog, Winter."

"It's dark when they scuff off to school.

It's good to trample the thin panes of casual

ice along the track, where twice a week

a freight that used to stop here lugs grain

and radiator hoses past us to a larger town.

It's good to cloud the paling mirror

of the dawn sky with your mouthwashed breath,

and to thrash and stamp against the way

you've been overdressed and pudged

into your down jacket like a pastel

sausage, and to be cruel to the cringing

dog and then to thump it and hug it and croon

to it nicknames. At last the pale sun rolls

over the horizon. And look!

The frosted windows of the schoolhouse gleam."

A poem by William Matthews from Selected Poems And Translations published by Houghton Mifflin company and used by permission here on the Writer's Almanac for Monday, December 9th, made possible by Cowles Enthusiast Media, publisher of Historic Traveler; and the historynet.com, where history lives on the world wide web. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

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CATHERINE WINTER: And that's Midmorning for today. Our engineers today were Mike Osborne and Patti Rai Rudolph. I'm Catherine Winter. On Midmorning tomorrow, Paula Schroeder returns. Paula will talk with Rob Fersh, who heads Food Research Action Center in Washington, DC. The center focuses on federal nutrition programs such as food stamps and breakfast and lunch programs. Also joining in the conversation tomorrow, Second Harvest Executive Director Dick Goebel, who will discuss the evolving role of food shelves and programs in American society.

Thanks for joining us on Midmorning today, and stay tuned for Midday.

GARY EICHTEN: A Senate panel examines the way the FBI handled its investigation of the Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta this summer. We'll have that story and the rest of the day's news on Morning Edition starting at 5:00 AM here on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM 91.1.

CATHERINE WINTER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. It's 23 degrees at KNOW FM 91.1. Minneapolis Saint Paul. In the Twin Cities, we have a few gray days coming up. It should be a little warmer today, but skies will be cloudy. The high should be around 30. Tonight, the skies should remain cloudy, and lows should be in the upper 20s. Tomorrow, rain is possible.