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[MUSIC PLAYING] KATHERINE LANPHER: Good morning. Welcome to Midmorning. I'm Katherine Lanpher. It's time for another round of Talking Volumes, the joint book club of Minnesota Public Radio, the Star Tribune and the Loft Literary Center. And our next Talking Volumes featured author is that prairie radical, Bill Holm, well known to many Minnesota readers for his provocative essays and poems, including his books, Coming Home Crazy, Boxelder Bug Variations, and his most recent book, Eccentric Islands. For Talking Volumes, we've reached back a few years to his 1996 book, The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth, a look at the power of failure, memory, and tiny Minneota, Minnesota. Well, join us as we talk to Bill Holm, who joins us today in the studio. Thanks for being here.

BILL HOLMES: It's a great pleasure to be up with the freeways and the stoplights.

KATHERINE LANPHER: [LAUGHS] Now, you write early on in the book that when you were 15, you had a very clear definition of failure. What was it?

BILL HOLM: To die in Minneota. I was a farm boy who absolutely loathed the place. I wanted to go to New York City and then abroad. I was disgusted with, I suppose, local culture in the United States. Nixon was vice president then, you remember, and Ezra Taft Benson was the Secretary of Agriculture. I just wanted to, as they say, blow the pop stand and see the city limits sign receding in the rear view mirror for the last time.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You write that failure is as American as success. What do you mean by that?

BILL HOLM: Well, we grow up surrounded by the language of success. And you've heard it in the last week or two in politics, the language of triumph, the language of victory, the language of "We're first, the stock market is raging away. Our military is the strongest in the world. We're the winners." And you hear it in sports talk. And when you go to high school, of course, that's what you also hear. You hear sports talk. You hear winning the contest. You hear triumphing.

And somehow none of the things that America wanted you to be good at interested me, sports and making money and being a professional, joining one of the professions, law or medicine. I wanted to be an eccentric writer and to have an eccentric life and to travel around and see eccentric places.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, then you've achieved success, haven't you?

BILL HOLM: Well, in a way, except my bank account is a little thin. So I suppose in some ways, in American terms, I don't own enough stuff. I haven't accumulated enough goods, I don't have enough machines. I mean, I don't even own a TV, but they're thinking of taking up a collection for me in Minnesota so that I can have my own.

[LAUGHING]

KATHERINE LANPHER: What prompted you to write this book?

BILL HOLM: I'd always wanted to write it. I wrote an essay, the first essay in the book to be written was it called The Music of Failure, and it was about an old lady who gave me the gift of music, essentially. She was a church organist, a woman who never married, and she worked as what you would now call a hired girl. And she was not a very good musician. But she loved music beyond all things, and I suppose she was the first person I ever heard play a piano. And so she was able to give me the gift of a love of music and of Handel and Bach and of the keyboard and of singing.

And I thought, here's Pauline, whom nobody has ever heard of, a woman who never went to school, who was not good looking, who never married, who never had any money, who worked as a domestic servant, who was a from a failed immigrant family where nobody ever made any money, and they all died childless, and yet she was a marvelous woman and able to give the gift of great art and civilization.

So I wrote an essay to honor her and tell the story of her life and describe the gifts that she had given me. And thinking that millionaires don't give gifts. It's people like Pauline who give gifts to their fellow citizens and to children and to their neighbors. So I wanted to populate a book with Pauline's neighbors, with the other old people in Minnesota who had given me gifts when I was a child.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I would love for you to read briefly from the book. You have a introductory section that I think sets things up quite nicely.

BILL HOLM: Well, if this winter doesn't depress you, this paragraph probably will.

KATHERINE LANPHER: [LAUGHS]

BILL HOLM: A lot of people, hear this stuff, and they say oh, it's so sad. I found myself in Minneota, almost 40, broke, unemployed, divorced, unpublished, my immediate family dead, and most of the people I loved and valued from my childhood ancient, senile or going fast. I was strangely happy and began writing affectionate essays and poems about those people, old Icelandic immigrants with odd accents, aunts, uncles, and babysitters who fed and praised me, faces I thought I had forgotten that came to astonishing life in the middle of hot afternoons, wide awake. These were no dreams. It was my own history, my own consciousness knocking at an interior door, asking for coffee and a little visit. I obliged.

What else could I do? I was brought up to have good manners, at least toward the old, the poor, the harmless, the generous, the eccentric, the simple who always proved to be the most complicated of all when you take the trouble to ask them real questions, and most of all, toward the dead. My stock of rudeness, even disdain. I reserved for those who I thought deserved it, the rich, the powerful, the successful, the well-adjusted, the consciously beautiful, the fashionable, or any handy authority that tried to order me down any road that might lead to my joining any of those gangs.

That little touch of arrogance in that last sentence. I'd forgotten that

KATHERINE LANPHER: [LAUGHS] I wasn't going to--

BILL HOLM: I was about to do a little criticism of the author and say, now, get out of the pulpit there, boy. Get out of the pulpit.

KATHERINE LANPHER: No, but you know why I love that section so much is the idea of your history, your consciousness knocking at the door and asking for coffee.

BILL HOLM: And a visit. Now, there's a word that's lost its credence in Minnesota. But, I used to call my mother, I remember, and I'd say, what were you doing? What we were just visiting? Or, where were you? Well, we went over to [INAUDIBLE] and Sophie and Edna came over there, and we had a visit. And people used to sit around the kitchen table, and they'd visit. It wasn't having dialogue or dialoguing together. It was, yeah, we were having a little visit. It's visiting.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're talking to Bill Holm. In fact, we're having a visit with him right now, and we'd like you to join us. It's 1-800-242-2828, 1-800-242-2828. Bill Holm's book, The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth, is our Talking Volumes selection. We'll be talking to him at the Fitzgerald Theater on January 11, but we'd like to have you join this conversation right now. We're having a visit with Bill Holm. You're invited. 651-227-6000, 651-227-6000. Perhaps you can give us your own definition of what failure is and what success is. Now, when do you think you achieved failure?

BILL HOLM: Well, as I describe it in that essay, I was about 40, and I had gotten a divorce. I had not had any children. I had no money. I had no job. I was pretty well-- and I was claimed to be a poet and a writer. And I had published poems in little magazines and a chapbook or something and a selected number of copies for selected numbers of people.

But I didn't amount to anything as a writer. And here I was, and I was thunderously in debt. My mother had died of melanoma without any insurance, and I was home as an only child collecting the bills. So I thought, what a great deal. Here I am, almost 40 years old, $150,000 in debt, no job, no family, no nothing. And I thought, well, it's an interesting situation the universe has put me into. Let's see what happens next.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, how did you arrive back in Minneota? You made some pretty interesting stops before you ended up back there.

BILL HOLM: When my mother died, I had to go back to probate the will and to deal with the bills and that kind of thing because I was an only child. And then, I realized that Minnesota was cheap, for one thing, and also that it was where my material was as a writer. I lived on the East Coast, and I had been abroad, and that kind of thing. But I couldn't write about that. I wasn't a national writer.

The people I knew and my material were these god-forsaken old immigrants, Belgians and Norwegians and Icelanders in this god-forsaken little town that if you told people where you were from, and even then I used to get the Lake Wobegon jokes, they'd say, where are you from? And I'd say, I'm from Minneota Minnesota. They'd say, oh, that's right next to Lake Wobegon. I'd say, well, except that it, of course, exists. And it is a comical name like Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and Canistota, South Dakota, and Minneota, Minnesota.

And I began defending these people, and they'd say, well, it must be really out in the middle of the boondocks. This is on the East Coast or even up in the cities, where nobody believes that the world exists west of Shakopee. So I would start telling these stories of these old Icelanders and the things they loved and their houses full of books and the gifts that they had given me as a kid. And lots of them, despite not being schooled-- I mean, they had some of them had never been inside a school in their life-- read in two or three languages, read poetry, honored poetry, and valued it.

And people like Pauline without any musical education understood that Bach was the greatest gift that music had given to the human race and played that music at every opportunity badly, slowly, and with great reverence and love so that all the old Icelanders were buried to the, last movement of Bach's St. Matthew Passion and to Handel's Largo from Xerxes with a few sliding missed notes here and there. But nevertheless, even with a missed note, you hear something inside that music that says, "The world is a very large and remarkable place."

KATHERINE LANPHER: One review of this book said that you make a virtue out of being parochial. What kind of virtue is that?

BILL HOLM: Being parochial. I think everyone is parochial. It's just that in New York, they've never heard of Minneota, Minnesota. This is often a problem that what are called, quote, "regional writers" have. My neighbor, Fred Manfred, was often afflicted with this, and that Fred thought he had the Nobel Prize coming. And he was a wonderful man, and he kept scribbling away these books, making these epic novels of the settling of what he called Siouxland, which was that little corner of Dakota and Iowa and Minnesota.

And of course, the reviews in New York, when they existed at all, were terribly stupid about this rough and boring life that Fred was describing. And I thought to myself, these are human beings Fred is describing. And if Grotto was right that every human being contains every possibility, then a place like Minnesota also contains every possibility for human intelligence and for human failure and for evil and for cunning and skullduggery. Why they even have votes in Minneota? I tell this story in the book, and I can't resist. Minneota was named in a crooked election with lost ballots. Do you remember that from the book?

KATHERINE LANPHER: No.

BILL HOLM: When they had the election in about 1880 to name the town, the other names were Jaeger's ville, Horton, and Upper Yellow Medicine Crossing. But the Norwegian immigrants wanted to name the town after Nils Jaeger, who had one of the general stores. But the other keeper of a general store was a guy named Doc Seals, who had been a snake oil salesman, probably selling whiskey to the local Indians and a charming con man. Well, Doc Seals thought that Horton and Upper Yellow Medicine Crossing were pretty boring as town names when the railroad was naming all these little burgs.

So he somehow connived before, even before the election, to get Minneota named Minneota officially by the Post Office Department. He had one of his employees, after he had gotten everybody properly whiskey'd up, go steal the ballot box and go out in the mud street in front of Doc Seal's store and tramp the ballots into the mud, so they could never be counted. And the Norwegians were furious. I mean, so I suppose it's a little like the gore force is now. But I often thought of that during this election that Minneota, my little hometown, began with a ballot dispute and a crooked election.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I have to say that I think your writing would be different if you had grown up in Horton.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, that's right.

KATHERINE LANPHER: There's just something--

BILL HOLM: Jaeger's ville.

KATHERINE LANPHER: [LAUGHS] I don't think you'd be the same person, Bill Holm.

BILL HOLM: Well, Minneota always did turn out literary types, partly because everybody always chuckled when they heard the name. And if you've got a humorous town name that already gets people laughing, you may as well tell them another joke and see if you can get their attention and write it down on paper.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Let's go to Marty. Marty, welcome to Midmorning.

MARTY: Thank you. Enjoying the program.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Where are you calling from, Marty?

MARTY: Saint Paul.

KATHERINE LANPHER: OK.

MARTY: Mr. Holm just wanted to say that I am a Black guy from Washington DC who stumbled across one of your books-- two of your books at the Merriam Park Library. And it was great. It was universal. You were talking about a character who may have been developmentally delayed in the community where you grew up. And it just sent me on a trip back in Northeast Washington DC to so many eccentrics or people who were somehow marginalized on the edges, but were really a part of that community. And so I just wanted to say thank you and that I think you speak to a lot more people than just Minnesotans and small towns.

BILL HOLM: Thank you for saying that. That's the nicest thing that I could hear about that book because I didn't mean it to be a book about Minnesota is a special place. It was different from other places, but rather, that it was typical. And I'd had very interesting mail on that book when it came out, sometimes from people in the south or from the west and from various little corners of the country that are quite unlike Minneota.

And they'd say, I knew all those people in your book, the old bag lady and the lady who played the piano badly for church and the carpenter with the loose dentures who read books all night and drank too much whiskey and the lady in town who was the best cook and always had the best fried chicken, I knew them all, but none of them had Icelandic names. I mean, they had Yankee names or Black names or German names or Jewish names. And I think that's what I meant to say in that book, that these people exist in everybody's life.

And one of your jobs, I suppose, as a grown-up is to honor your own dead. We've had a lot of complaint in American books about miserable childhoods. And I think every childhood is miserable in its own way and joyous in its own way. And if you survive to adulthood, you ought to be grateful. But then at that point, it's your business to find something to praise, even in the unlikeliest corners of your own childhood.

KATHERINE LANPHER: One thing that struck me when rereading The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth is that this is a book that could be written about any small town or any small community, that this is a book as much about how we look at life as it is about how you looked at Minneota.

BILL HOLM: And not necessarily even rural. I think you could do this book in a Twin Cities neighborhood. I'm always sorry that somebody didn't write a book about the east side of Saint Paul when it was still a sort of ethnic enclave in the bottom of Paint Avenue. It was all Italians.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Or Swede Hollow for that instance. We're going to go to Janelle in Saint Paul. Janelle, welcome to Midmorning.

JANELLE: Well, welcome. And I just wanted to say hi to Bill. He's is a longtime friend from Gustavus and then also to comment on the visiting idea. I had an opportunity to spend some time with my parents this last weekend, and we did some of that visiting with aunts and uncles, and it was great.

BILL HOLM: You've got a steal-your-bladder to get plenty of cups of thin coffee into it. And there are all the jokes that everybody tells about a little lunch. But if you go out-- and this is as true in Scandinavia as it is in Minnesota-- if somebody says, well, come into the house for a little coffee, that means three kinds of bars and a little plate of cheese and a little plate of pastries and maybe some pie and whatever else is in the freezer. And you can't not eat that stuff.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I'm so sorry. We have nothing here for you right now. Here we are visiting, and we've gotten you bad coffee. [LAUGHS] But there are no bars.

BILL HOLM: It's a little thin. This is real Minnesota coffee you make here.

KATHERINE LANPHER: It's Minnesota Public Radio. We have to have Minnesota coffee.

BILL HOLM: But no, I do give a recipe for real Minnesota coffee in this book. One of my claims is even if the book is no good and my prose is lousy, there's a couple of recipes that work. And one of the recipes, and if you went to Gustavus, Janelle, you remember my young's egg coffee, farm water was sometimes so bad in Minnesota, that the coffee would be just acrid. So one of the ways they would make the coffee drinkable is to beat up an egg.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I've never understood why the egg was necessary.

BILL HOLM: What clears the coffee. I mean, so you'd get those big church basement pots, the big white porcelain pots, and you'd boil water in it, and you'd make this sort of awful-looking glop of coffee grounds and eggs, and you'd drop it in, and it would go "Bloop." And then you would steep it about three times and just let it settle to the bottom, and then you had a little strainer to pour the coffee.

But the coffee was actually so clear at that point because of something in the egg-- I have no idea what the chemistry was-- that it would take the impurities out of the water, and you would get, if not, strong coffee. I mean, we're not talking Starbucks espresso here. We're talking-- you can see to the bottom of the cup. But it didn't have the kind of sulfurous taste that farm water sometimes had.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Peter in Minneapolis. Welcome to Midmorning.

PETER: Hi, I really enjoyed your book on China. I thought that was great. And actually, I heard you talk about Fred Manfred. I didn't call with that in mind. But I had met him years and years ago, and he was something. And he was 6 foot 9".

BILL HOLM: 6' 10" on good days. He'd lie a little bit. [LAUGHS]

PETER: I was just a kid, and I was just in awe of him. He was something else. But what I was going to tell you about was years ago, I used to drive a cab. And, I could always count on the fact that the people that you knew were going to give you a really good tip were the ones that you could just see that they just barely had it.

I mean, the people that-- it was just amazing. People who were just barely getting by, and yet they would always be very generous. I'm not sure that ties, how closely that ties to your book and what you're talking about, but that's what I thought of when you were talking about the people, the failures, and the misfits from the small town. That's what happened to me. Those people were always so generous.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Thank you, Peter.

BILL HOLM: I've got to respond to a little story. I once my timing chain once went out on the freeway between just about halfway to Fargo through North Dakota from Bismarck. And there, I sit on the freeway. And I was brought up in Minnesota that if you didn't stop for somebody by the side of the road and your father heard about it, you were in deep trouble. You were always supposed to stop, particularly when the weather was bad, but always.

Well, I'm standing by the side of the freeway with my hood up trying to wave somebody down and the Lexus and the Mercedes and the Buicks and the Cadillacs are and the SUVs are accelerating and going by in the other lane. And I thought, where are the cops when you need them? Well, it wasn't the cops who finally stopped. It was a poor young couple in about '79 Plymouth, half rusted out.

And the guy says, you having trouble, buddy? I said, yeah, I don't know what it is. And he says, well, I'm a mechanic. I'll see what-- pop that hood again. We'll see. And he looks at it, and he says, I'm afraid your timing chain is out there. You're going to have to get a tow into Fargo. But there's a couple of places that I wouldn't go to because they overcharge you. But this guy's pretty good. He's fair. And he said, I'll give you a ride into Fargo. And so I'm coasting into Fargo in this rusty '79 Plymouth, and in a way, coming home crazy as about this.

KATHERINE LANPHER: That's your book about China.

BILL HOLM: Yeah. Which is really a book about Minneota. All my books are about Minneota. I don't know anything about China. I had some adventures, and Minneota looked a little different when I got home. But one of the things I found was it in a poor country, when you would go and have dinner, you'd go to somebody's house for dinner, and the first place they'd have 20 courses, and they'd be cooking on, you know, a five-gallon pail with a piece of chicken wire, and they'd bankrupt themselves for the best wine and the best food.

And it was a wonderful evenings full of gaiety. And then they'd say, would you like to see our apartment? And these were the dismal cement apartments, two rooms, no toilet, no plumbing, and furniture, that packing crates, and a few lovely things, like an old piece of calligraphy from grandpa. But you'd go through these houses, and they'd say, how do you like this? Well, what do you say? I remember once we were looking at a lamp. It was a light bulb with a sort of artificial Greek head over it. It was a terrible piece of kitsch. And they said, this is our-- we got this lamp last year. What do you think of this?

I mean, do you say, it's a terrible piece of kitsch. It's utterly tasteless crap? You don't say that. You say, it's lovely. It's a very nice lamp. They said, you really like it? I said, it is very nice. And they'd say, well, we would be so honored if you would take this lamp as a gift from us. I mean, the same thing would happen to the calligraphy on the wall or a family treasure.

You'd go to the houses of people who were so infinitely poor, and they would give you whatever you admired. And I thought, that's kind of the way it works in Edina. If you go out to dinner and, there's an Austrian-cut glass chandelier over the mahogany table and you say, God, that's a beautiful chandelier. And the host always says, do you really like that chandelier? Yeah, I love it. It's gorgeous. He said, we've got too much crap anyway. We don't need that. It doesn't give good light anyway when you're eating. Let me get that down. You take that home with you.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're having a visit with Bill Home. He's an essayist, musician and poet. He's also the Talking Volumes selection for our most recent edition of that book club we share with the Star Tribune and with the Loft Literary Center. We're talking to him about his book, The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth. It's a look at the power of failure, the power of memory, the power of Minneota, Minnesota. We'd like to have you join our visit. Come on, pick up the phone, 1-800-242-28281, 1-800-242-2828. In the Twin cities, it's 651-227-6000, 651-227-6000.

Now, if you need more information about Talking Volumes or about our selection of The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth, go to MinnesotaPublicRadio.org and click on the Talking Volumes icon. All right. I'm Katherine Lanpher. You're listening to Midmorning. We're going to turn now to Greta Cunningham. She's standing by with the latest from the Minnesota Public Radio newsroom.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Thank you, Catherine, and good morning. President-elect Bush is meeting today with a Democrat who could become part of his administration. Louisiana Senator John Breaux has been mentioned as a possible Energy Secretary. Breaux has expressed reluctance at leaving the Senate since it's evenly divided, but he hasn't ruled it out. Bush is expected to begin making cabinet announcements as early as tomorrow. Aides say one of the first appointments to be announced could be General Colin Powell as Secretary of State.

The Chernobyl nuclear power plant has been switched off for the last time, and President Clinton calls that a triumph for the common good. In 1986, the Ukrainian plant was the site of the world's worst nuclear power plant accident. There was intense international pressure to shut down the plant. The threat of contamination has prompted cargo turkey products to voluntarily recall 17 million pounds of ready-to-eat poultry products. The products were packaged under various brands and sold throughout the United states, Iceland, and Venezuela. The company says customers should return the items to the store for a refund. The government is looking into whether the products could be linked to 25 cases of listeriosis in the United states, most of which have occurred since July. The products were made at Cargill's Waco, Texas, facility.

In regional news, an attorney for a man accused of killing. His estranged wife has asked that the trial of [? Fu ?] Joseph [? Hu ?] being moved from the Dakota County to Hennepin County. The attorneys told the judge yesterday that the extensive media coverage of the death may have tainted the jury pool in Dakota County. [? Hu ?] is scheduled to go to trial in March in connection with the August 22 shooting death of Merrihew at the family's home in Eagan. The judge is expected to rule within a week.

[? Hu's ?] next court appearance is February 26. There is a winter storm watch for the north tonight and Saturday and a winter storm watch for the far south-east on Saturday. There is a chance of light snow in the forecast today for the state of Minnesota with high temperatures ranging from near 10-above in the northwest to 25-above in the southeast. At this hour, some light snow is falling in Rochester, a temperature of 14-above. It's cloudy in Duluth, a temperature of 9-above, some light snow is falling in Saint Cloud and 10-above. And in the Twin Cities, cloudy skies, a temperature of 13 above zero. That's a look at the latest news.

KATHERINE LANPHER: News programming is made possible in part by membership contributions from listeners like you. If you have not yet made your 2,000 contribution, please call 1-800-227-20811 today. Today's programming is sponsored in part by Betty and Paul Picard to wish happy birthday to two great guys, Brennan and Hunt Green

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SPEAKER 1: It's one of Minnesota's most beloved holiday events. the Minnesota Dance Theater's Nutcracker Fantasy. If you're a Minnesota Public Radio member, we'd like to thank you for your support with a special members-only discount on tickets to the December 21 performance at the historic Orpheum Theater. Just call Ticketmaster at 612-673-0404 and remember to have your member number handy. That's the Nutcracker Fantasy December 21 for MPR members only.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I'm Katherine Lanpher. You're listening to Midmorning here on Minnesota Public Radio. We're continuing our conversation with Bill Holm. He is our latest Talking Volumes featured author. We're going to be talking to him on January 11 at the Fitzgerald Theater about his 1996 book, The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth. If you need more information about Talking Volumes, you can go to MinnesotaPublicRadio.org, click on the talking volumes icon.

Boy, we look forward to seeing you on January 11. Also, want to remind you that this Sunday, Senior Cultural Editor John Habeck will have a profile of Bill Holm in the Star Tribune. Of course, this book club is a partnership. It's the Loft Literary Center, the Star Tribune, and Minnesota Public Radio. Now, this is a book club you want to join. Come on. We also want to remind you that you can join our conversation right now. It's 1-800-202-28281, 1-800-202-28281 800 585 10b5. If you're in the Twin cities, it's 651-227-6000 Let's go to the phones. It's Mike in Barnum. Welcome to Midmorning, Mike.

MIKE: Hello

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi.

MIKE: How are you doing?

KATHERINE LANPHER: OK.

MIKE: Well, first, I want to thank you for your show. It's really great. And I'm a first-time caller, but I couldn't help after listening to the conversation, a little bit of my history as I grew up in the Twin Cities area. However, my mother grew up, was raised in a small town in North Dakota. So consequently, I spent all my summers there and a tiny little town of farming community of about 300 people. I grew up, I joined the Navy. I spent 20 years traveling most of the world's major cities, and then a couple of years ago, came home and rediscovered my extended family.

Memorial Day of 1999, I went to the small town to visit a spur of the moment thing where my grandfather and grandmother are buried. I met one of my cousins, and we went. And while I was standing there, it was raining, and it was windy, and it was cold, and it was miserable. But I felt warm and safe back in this community.

And I made a point of mentioning to her just how that was and how that was strange and the people there and how they were so different. And what she had told me was that when those areas were settled and the values that they brought and the diversity they faced with the weather and settling in Newland, how they had to rely on each other and how they developed those relationships and relationships with the environment and how that was kept alive.

BILL HOLM: Boy, that's true. In immigrant communities, you had no choice but to live with weather. And in some ways, this awful weather that we live in North Dakota and Minnesota has formed us in has made us. There are jokes that Garrison tells, and they're true, about bad weather building character. Well, it does in a way, and the character might not always be good, and it might not always be something that we fancy. And we probably need a little more Italy in us to loosen up.

But it surely has something, and that's a wonderful image of standing in the rain. Two novelists you should read if you're discovering your North Dakota boyhood, read Larry Woiwode, who's got a wonderful book called Beyond the Bedroom Wall about family in North Dakota and a woman named Lois Hudson, who-- I don't remember the name of the novel at the moment, but there's wonderful stuff that's come out of North Dakota about that. And when you think of it, why shouldn't literature come out of North Dakota or out of Minneota?

I mean, I was in Greece last month, and I was floating around in the islands that Odysseus was floating around on his way back to Ithaca. All literature is local, and there's something parochial and weak in a culture that classifies literature from one place as regional and from another place as national. That's a weakness in us, in a kind of inferiority complex. In America we'll have grown up when we understand that North Dakota is as likely to hatch the greatest of American books as Manhattan or California.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You said once in an interview that this book also could have been titled "Renting the World from the Dead."

BILL HOLM: Yeah.

KATHERINE LANPHER: What do you mean by that?

BILL HOLM: I stole that phrase from Robert Bly, who used it in The Sibling Society. And Robert is talking about the relations of young people and old people and the fact that the young these days don't have much of a sense of history. That's true. I teach. And we've fairly well lost our connection to sequences of events. But when you think of it, there are a lot more dead than living.

And the world did not begin with your birth, and that somehow the work you do, whether as a scientist or a historian or an artist, or just as a human being living your life, you stand on the shoulders of your ancestors and of everybody who's ever amounted to anything and given some gift to civilization that even if you don't love Bach, for instance, if you're a Lutheran or if you're a human being, you stand on his shoulders. And even if you're not a reader of Russian and you try to be a writer and you try to create a room and create a scene, you stand on Tolstoy's shoulders. And that's not bad. It's nice to have connections.

KATHERINE LANPHER: The booth suddenly feels crowded. [LAUGHS]

BILL HOLM: Tolstoy and [INAUDIBLE] and all these dead people here piled up to the ceiling.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We don't have enough chairs. Let's go to John in Saint Paul. Welcome to Midmorning.

JOHN: Thanks for taking my call. Bill, enjoy your work. And I'm from Watson, Minnesota, and I don't remember which piece of literature it is. But the one piece I always remember that you have written is the piece about having a prairie eye.

BILL HOLM: Well, that's an old piece from Minnesota Monthly magazine in the '70s, yes.

JOHN: Yeah, well, I'll tell you, that's one of my favorite little stories. And I've found out over the years that that's what I've got. Because if I'm away from the prairie for too long, I miss that notion of a horizontal vista. So Thanks for your work.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, and people like us, when they take us to the Northwoods, and they say, aren't the Boundary Waters wonderful? They'd say, get out the chainsaw. Let's plant some beans you can't see.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, what do you mean by a prairie eye?

BILL HOLM: I once made the distinction between the prairie eye and the woods eye. The prairie eye is that likes to see a long way, the eye of distance, and also that eye sees a small thing in detail. I mean, in other words, in order to look at the prairie, you have to get right down into it with your nose. But otherwise, I like seeing great sweeps of landscape, even a little hill in the prairie out in the South Dakota border, you can see 30, 40 miles. And people take me to the North woods or they take me to canyons. God, I hate canyons. Oh, Lord, I get claustrophobia. And they say, isn't it beautiful in the woods that leafy canopy? I'd say, can we go out in the middle of the lake where we can see something? I'm getting a little nervous here.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Let's go to David in Grand Forks. Welcome to Midmorning.

DAVID: Hi. Bill, I've read a lot of your stuff over the years. I was introduced to your stuff in a article in Minnesota Monthly in the late '80s, actually, and collected all your books over the years. And in '97, we had our little flood up here. I lost them all.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, I should send you a couple.

DAVID: I'd appreciate it. But, yeah, I didn't even know you had a new book coming out, and I'm going down this afternoon and picking it up before I go to work.

KATHERINE LANPHER: All right. Well, thanks. That gives us an opportunity to make the distinction here, because Eccentric Islands is your new book. And for Talking Volumes, we're reaching back to an older book. Let's talk about Eccentric Islands for one moment. You talk about how geography can-- we were talking about how weather can build character, but you also write about how geography can shape character.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, in Eccentric, of course, I always-- my joke is, all my books are about Minneota, and that the Eccentric Islands book begins with my first imaginary island, which was a cottonwood tree in the middle of my father's flax field that I made into my imaginary island. And then it ends with a little quote that I found in an 18th century explorer in Saskatchewan.

When they were first exploring the trackless wastes of prairie Canada, and they would see trees, which was always a sign of a river course and some water somewhere, they would call that an island, and they would say, we took the dogsleds toward the island in the howling blizzard. So those little oasis in the prairie, those places where trees grew, and there was a creek, were called islands. And I thought, what a lovely metaphor. So that an island doesn't only have to be something surrounded by water, it can also be trees surrounded by a half a continent of snow and grass.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to John in Saint Paul. Welcome to Midmorning.

JOHN: Hello.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi.

JOHN: Bill, I love the poetic quality and the observations you have of small towns. I've been spending a lot of time in Ely in the last few years, and I've noticed a difference between the city and the small town. In the small town, when they make change, they look in your eyes. And in the city, when they make change, they look at your hands. And I've just noticed that there's a lot of differences between the small town and the big town. I grew up in Minneapolis. But what I'm curious about is why do the people of Ely have a real disdain for the big city people and the big city people have a real disdain for the small town people and was wondering, where does that come from, this disdain of the small and the big?

BILL HOLM: Well, I think that's an ancient thing, not just in American literature, but in European literature, the disdain of the urbane for the rural. You remember in Marx's Communist Manifesto, he calls the idiocy of rural life. And one of the things that communism will do is it will bring industry and factories and cities where workers can live together and not be isolated in the idiocy of rural life.

Well, I think whatever Marx was right about, he was dead wrong about that one. But that contempt for the country goes back a long way and to either have contempt for it or to romanticize it. And that's the opposite thing. There's lots of stuff in American literature at the moment that romanticizes the healthy and wholesome rural character. Sin and evil and decadence and corruption can exist as well on an isolated farm among wholesome Lutheran immigrants as they can in any and all sleazy Manhattan club.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, you heard it here first. [LAUGHS] We're talking to Bill Holm. He is the talking volumes author for our latest edition of the Joint Book club, run by Minnesota Public radio, the Star Tribune and the Loft Literary Center. We're talking to him about his 1996 book, The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth. We'd like to have you join this conversation. It's 1-800-242-2828. In the Twin cities, 651-227-6000. Now, you've talked about how one of your passions in life is music and how that was given to you by Pauline Bardel?

BILL HOLM: Bardal.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Bardal, OK. And you also obviously have this passion for writing. One of the other passions you have that you write about in a very compelling way in this book is your life as an eater.

BILL HOLM: Well, that's because of my anorexia. I had to deal with that issue. And I think of myself as a recovering anorexic. And those who examine me usually find that I'm doing pretty well.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I was going to say, I think you've recovered quite nicely.

BILL HOLM: Yeah, I do love eating. I mean, who doesn't?

KATHERINE LANPHER: What is Vinarterta?

BILL HOLM: Vinarterta is Icelandic soul food for immigrants, not for Icelanders. I mean, it's almost just something they still make in bakeries in the old country, but you hardly get fussy about it. But if you grew up in an Icelandic immigrant community, everybody's mother made this. So it's the food, and there's a version of it in every culture, like Lutefisk or Booyah or whatever old Beancurd that connects you to your own past. It's like Proust's Madeleine and, the remembrance of things past, but it's essentially a prune cake. It's a kind of cookie dough flavored with cardamom, lots of cardamom if you believe in leading a spicy and exciting life. And then you boil down prunes.

Well, now, the Icelanders interestingly enough, put rhubarb in it in the old country. And Americans go and have a piece of Icelandic Vinarterta, and they say oh, no, this is wrong. You don't put rhubarb, prunes, prunes. And the Icelanders say, what are you talking about? This is Iceland. This is what we put in Iceland. They say, well, my mother put prunes in the Vinarterta, and that's right. They even have arguments about how many layers and whether to frost it.

KATHERINE LANPHER: So it's a layered cake?

BILL HOLM: Yeah, and you have to cure it, and, of course, exciting people cure it in a cheesecloth soaked in brandy or bourbon.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Wow, and there's several recipes for this.

BILL HOLM: Oh, yeah, but the right one is there, and I indicate which is the right one. And if you make the wrong one, your moral turpitude is your responsibility, not mine.

KATHERINE LANPHER: In this book, you have the best defense for eating lutefisk that I've ever read. And I thought perhaps we should revisit that because it is the holiday season. And I think there are many folks who are going to find themselves confronted with a piece of lutefisk.

BILL HOLM: That's the right verb. [LAUGHS]

KATHERINE LANPHER: And I even would eat it, I think, after reading your thoughts on this. So please.

BILL HOLM: It's like, on passover dinner when you eat the bitter herbs. You do that to remind yourself of your history and of the dead that you rent the world from. And when a Norwegian eats lutefisk, they eat it not because it's a pleasure because, god, I mean, think of it. It's not. But it does connect you with the life of your grandparents, and it connects you with the sad immigration from Norway and the upheaval of half of the population of a country. It connects you with their desire that you should have an education, and you should be able to live in Minnetonka and make jokes about lutefisk.

So when you eat it, you should almost lift the forkful up and toast the memory of your ancestors, and then, of course, if you have a napkin [LAUGHS] No, you should have a biter, too. I always did. My auntie Clarice, who is a character in this book, the cook, would make lutefisk. And when I was invited to Clarice's house, I knew that it was my job to be polite.

And when my uncle Albo said, ah, Clarice, the lutefisk is so good this year. What do you think, Billy? And I'd say, well, you're right, Albo. The lutefisk is just as good this year as it was last year. Pass the meatballs. But you'd have to have a couple of bites, and you couldn't make any smart talk because there were people who were involved in a ritual, and it was not your business to interfere with it.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Spencer in Virginia. Spencer, welcome to Midmorning.

SPENCER: Thank you. I just like to tell you I appreciate this program so much, and I really am enjoying listening to Bill Holm. I love the way he's connected to life. I was visiting with a friend one time, and they were talking about these people were from Dakota, and whenever there was a storm, how the people literally gathered together in a home, so they could spend the time together in their homes. Do you have any recollections of anything like that?

BILL HOLM: Well, that was even worse in Minneota. My parents were poker players, and they tried to get snowed in over at one of the Van Moreland boys, so you could have a penny ante game where you had a couple of bottles of Guckenheimer and some tuna fish sandwiches and, you know, all the necessary equipment for poker games. So I remember many wonderful card games in blizzards. You always want it to be snowed in with card players.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Talk for a minute about the farm where you grew up.

BILL HOLM: Well, my grandfather homesteaded part of the land and bought part of it from the Saint Peter and Winona Railroad in 1885. And he had come from Iceland, from the Coast. And I make a joke about this in Eccentric Islands. Of course, all the Icelanders, because they had no last names, they used patronymic. He were somebody's son or daughter, had to find a last name for citizenship papers. So he went from his farm he had homesteaded down to Marshall and took the name Home, which is the equivalent of John Doe or Smith.

It's not, an unusual name. But I finally looked it up in a dictionary, and it means "little island." And I thought that showed real humor on the part of my grandfather that here he is, 2,000 miles from the sea and 5,000 miles from his former farm. And he calls himself "island," right there on the Dakota border. But the farm was on top of a little tiny hill about 50 feet high. And like a crazy Icelander, he built it into the north wind. So on these snowy days, I always think of my childhood bedroom where I take a glass of water and set it by the side of the bed, and in the morning, the glass would be frozen. That would be grounds for child abuse now, wouldn't it? [LAUGHS] No heat in the bedroom.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You traveled to Iceland. In fact, you taught in Iceland at one point.

BILL HOLM: And I'm a homeowner in Iceland now. I bought a house there.

KATHERINE LANPHER: You did?

BILL HOLM: Yep, and a little fjord in the North, not the fjord where my relatives came from, but I think a prettier one.

KATHERINE LANPHER: How often do you go over?

BILL HOLM: Was there all of last summer, had a little writer's workshop. Carol Bly taught in it. And we're going to do that for a couple of weeks every summer, and then I'm just going to spend the rest of the summer writing in Iceland. But yeah, I love Iceland. Interestingly enough, my affection for Iceland and my desire to spend some time there increased as I realized how un-Icelandic I was. At the moment, anybody emigrates. We had a Black Collin. We've had a German Collin. We've had somebody from North Dakota, and we've had a guy from the military. And all of these people, have come somehow to these shores.

But the interesting thing is, when you get here, even in 15 minutes, you go through a sea change. And these people who called today, all of them, are my cousins, not the Icelanders.

KATHERINE LANPHER: How so?

BILL HOLM: We're Americans. I mean, for better or worse, we're complicit in this whole business we just went through in the election. And it's lovely to honor your own immigrant past. But the moment immigrants get here, they go through a great sea change. Don't know if it's the air. Don't know if it's the winter. Don't know if it's the minerals in the water. But we become more closely connected to each other than we are to our past. But that just meant for me that Iceland became an ever more fascinating place, the more foreign it got.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Well, one thing I was curious about is what it is like to observe? You grew up with an immigrant's memory of Iceland and then you went to see it yourself, and now you have a house there? Are these competing visions of Iceland?

BILL HOLM: Oh, sure, and the Iceland that my grandparents left is long gone. I mean, now these farms have all got people sitting on the internet sending email, and their little kids, 12, 13 years old, have got cell phones and beepers, and they're calling each other as kids do in the next room and say, hi, where are you. I'm in the kitchen. Where are you? I'm in the living room. Well, what's going on in the kitchen? Well, we're making coffee. What's going on in the living room? We're watching TV. But Sven is on the computer. Oh, that's pretty interesting. I mean, so it's a different world now.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Do you speak Icelandic?

BILL HOLM: Very badly. I can survive and get through an evening if nobody speaks English. But that almost never happens in Iceland. Among old people, sometimes I have to speak Icelandic, and they have to forgive me for my awful grammar, my dreadful vocabulary, and my butchery of pronunciation.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Beverly in Duluth. Welcome to Midmorning.

BEVERLY: Good morning.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Hi.

BEVERLY: I remember coming across Bill Holm's book, Music of Failure in a public library, and the writings and the photography both I thought were very powerful. But I really think that Mr. Holm-- excuse me, cousin Bill's writings should be required reading in our schools because we can learn so much from what he writes about, how he celebrates simpleness and learning from the simple, patience, acceptance, looking out for others. Really appreciate how that is celebrated in Bill's writing.

BILL HOLM: I like that idea of using my books in the school. I think of the royalty checks. I'd sell the house in Iceland and buy one in Cancun or somewhere. Well, I wouldn't actually. That's a lovely idea that. The old Music of Failure, by the way, is still in print. That was the first version of The Heart Can be Filled. And it does have wonderful black and white photographs of the prairies in it. I still have some affection for that old book, and it's still in print with that one essay in it that's in both books.

I suppose in so far, if somebody wanted to do a reader's digest condensed version of what Bill Holm had to say in the world before, he's carted off to the next one, I'd tell him to read the essay, The Music of Failure that I don't know if I've ever had any serious ideas about the world and my notions of it that I don't say in that essay. So however badly or well, I say them, that's what it is, I have to say, in the world.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Music is so clearly a strong passion for you. Writing obviously is necessary for you. How do those two passions intertwine? How do they interact for you?

BILL HOLM: Well, I use music as a metaphor almost always. There's a chapter on the piano, the island of the piano. In music-- and I sometimes I print music in my books. That's my indulgence. So the box elder books are full of my little box elder bug variations and Eccentric Islands has got a left-handed arrangement of a Malagasy Folk tune. But for me, music is how I write. I get up in the morning, and I sit at the kitchen table. And if I get stuck, and a paragraph is not going well, I work on hard piano pieces.

So my technique always improves when I'm writing a book. And what I did Eccentric Islands, I learned about five or six big left-hand pieces, just working on left-hand technique Godowsky and Scriabin and Blumenfeld and that kind of thing. And now, I'm working on another little book of poems, and I'm trying to learn all the Chopin Mazurkas. So if I get stuck, I go into the piano, and I work out fingerings. And of course, I'm awkward, and I'm not a professional pianist, and nobody would ever pay to listen to me. But it's such a joy to sit and see if you can make it sound a little like Chopin.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We're going to go to Gary in Saint Paul. Welcome to Midmorning.

GARY: Good morning. I know you're just about out of time. Bill, I wanted to know if there are any particular books you're recommending these days. What have you read lately that's really struck you?

BILL HOLM: The one that depressed me most is a book called The Twilight of American Culture by Marshall Berman. It describes what's gone wrong in the schools. And none of It-- we don't read enough. We don't think enough. And unless we remedy that, we really won't have a culture. I just got done reading a delightful-- well, not a delightful, but it's my favorite raver and ranter in American literature, Philip Roth, his book on academic life, the human stain. I envy his raving and ranting, and no matter how I try to fulminate, I can never do it as grandly as Roth.

So if you like raving and ranting, that one will get you through Christmas. But I'm also reading a book, a kind of homage. I think the working class is coming back. Woman in Minnesota named Cheri Register did a book about growing up in Albert Lea during the big strike at the end of the '50s. And I'm reading that. It's just of course-- I was a teenager then, and I remember that it was the end of Orval Freeman's political career.

KATHERINE LANPHER: It's called Packinghouse Daughter.

BILL HOLM: Packinghouse Daughter. It's a wonderful book. But who knows? Blue collar types may become fashionable again.

KATHERINE LANPHER: We have run out of time. Bill Holm, we look forward to seeing you on January 11 at the Fitzgerald.

BILL HOLM: Even if it's blizzarding, I'll be here. And what a wonderful idea this book club is. Thank you for doing it.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Oh, thank you. Bill Holm is the author of The Heart Can be Filled Anywhere on Earth. That is our latest talking volumes selection. We want to remind you there'll be a profile of Bill Holm this Sunday in the Star Tribune. We also urge you to go to our website, MinnesotaPublicRadio.org to find out more about Talking Volumes.

And we urge you to show up on January 11 at the Fitzgerald Theater where we will have a book club meeting. And we're even hoping he doesn't know this yet to get Bill Holm to play the piano. OK, we'll see you on January 11. If you've missed any Midmorning shows for the last week, you can find them online at MinnesotaPublicRadio.org. Make sure that you click the link for Midmorning.

SPEAKER 1: Broadcast of Talking Volumes is supported by 21NorthMain.com where book lovers find 14 million gently read books, including the works of today's authors.

SPEAKER 2: E-tailing was the Darling of 1999. A year later, thousands of websites are out of business.

SPEAKER 3: It's been a tough year for a lot of people on the internet.

SPEAKER 2: Later, we check in with two e-tailers, a year after they started their businesses.

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SPEAKER 2: How they're doing on All Things considered from MPR News.

KATHERINE LANPHER: I'm Katherine Langford. We want to Thank Randy Johnson, Genaro Vasquez, our producers, Gabrielle Zuckerman, and Carrie Dwyer this week. Mike Edgerly is in for Gary Eichten. What are you going to do, sir?

MIKE EDGERLY: Well, we're going to talk a little politics, Kathrine. In the first hour, professor, Steven Schier from Carleton College will be along to talk about George W. Bush and the Clinton legacy, one president departs, another begins the job anew. And then in hour two, we're going to talk books. We won't Bill Holm, but I bet we talk about some of Bill Holm's books with Colleen Coughlin. She's a librarian and a bookstore owner, and we're going to talk about giving books this Christmas. It's a great time to think about the kind of books that people close to you would like to have as gifts and maybe some books they wouldn't like to have.

KATHERINE LANPHER: Why, Mr. Edgerly? Did I give you that list?

MIKE EDGERLY: I don't think I've seen that, Katherine. I'll have to look harder for it, I suppose.

KATHERINE LANPHER: OK, all right. And of course, we want to remind you again, if you need more information on Talking Volumes, go to MinnesotaPublicRadio.org, and again, put January 11 down on your calendar for Bill Holm.

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KATHERINE LANPHER: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. 14 degrees, some mist at--