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GRETA CUNNINGHAM: From Minnesota Public Radio, I'm Greta Cunningham. A federal appeals court hears arguments today on whether to loosen political restrictions on judicial candidates. The Republican Party will ask the court to remove such restrictions as the one that bars judicial candidates from soliciting campaign funds.

Saint Paul residents will comment on their 2003 property tax levies at a hearing at Arlington High School tonight. Elected officials from the city council, Saint Paul School board, and Ramsey County Board of Commissioners will be on hand for the meeting known as the Truth and Taxation Hearing.

City council President Dan Bostrom says, the meetings have been relatively low key for the past several years as property tax increases have been modest. But this year the community and school district have raised their levies. Plus, a legislative change has shifted some of the property tax load from businesses to homeowners. Bostrom says, he and the other officials will be there mainly to listen to what residents have to say.

DAN BOSTROM: The problem that you're always faced with this is that as you talk to folks, nobody thinks we should get by with fewer police officers or fewer firefighters, and nobody wants the library hours shortened, or the days of service shortened. So it's extremely difficult.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: The city portion of the property tax levy did not increase this year. However, the council expects to increase assessment fees for several city services. A bloodhound is back at work searching for missing University of Minnesota student, Chris Jenkins. He was last seen at a downtown Minneapolis bar on Halloween. Family members are hopeful the bloodhound will help them discover what happened to Jenkins.

The forecast for Minnesota calls for mostly sunny skies statewide with high temperatures ranging from 40 in the Northeast to 48 in the Southwest. Right now, in Duluth, it's fair and 34. In the Twin cities, partly sunny, 35. That's a news update. I'm Greta Cunningham.

SPEAKER 1: Programming is supported by Thrivent financial for Lutherans, a Fortune 500 financial services organization providing nearly 3 million members with financial strategies, customer focused service and a wide range of financial products and services online at thrivent.com.

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MIKE EDGERLY: Good afternoon and welcome back to Midday. I'm Mike Edgerly in today for Gary Eichten. In this hour, Voices of Minnesota conversations with two of the state's most interesting literary figures. Emilie Buchwald is a founder of Milkweed Editions and the winner of this year's McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. Later in the hour, we hear from Mary Winstead, author of the new book Back to Mississippi. Here's Minnesota Public Radio's Dan Olson.

DAN OLSON: Milkweed Editions founder and publisher Emilie Buchwald would like to say yes to the thousands of authors who each year send her manuscripts.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: And I think one of the most difficult parts of my job is that I have to say no more than 90% of the time. And that I hate.

DAN OLSON: When author Mary Winstead started to write down her father's memories of growing up in rural Neshoba county, Mississippi, she uncovered a chapter of family history no one talked about.

MARY WINSTEAD: Freedom Summer, during which the three civil rights workers were murdered had begun in Neshoba County and that they had been murdered not far away from where my dad grew up. But what I didn't know, and I discovered through my research was that Edgar Ray Killen, who was alleged to have masterminded the murders, was my father's cousin.

DAN OLSON: This hour conversations with Emilie Buchwald and Mary Winstead.

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Emilie Buchwald is the winner of this year's McKnight foundation Distinguished Artist Award. She started the organization that would become Milkweed Editions 23 years ago. Each year, the Minneapolis-based nonprofit publishes books that focus on cultural diversity, environmental stewardship, and poetry, along with literature for children. Writers published by Milkweed include Janisse Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood; Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948; Bapsi Sidhwa, author of Cracking India; and many others.

Emilie Buchwald is a writer, a former college professor and the mother of four daughters. She was born in Vienna, Austria. Her father, an attorney, and her mother, a concert pianist, fled the country for the United States as Hitler's power spread. Buchwald grew up in Queens, New York. She spoke with me at the Milkweed Editions offices on Washington Avenue in Minneapolis.

When your family sat down with you later on and talked with you about leaving Austria, what kinds of stories came up? Did a picture emerge of what were the circumstances for leaving, obviously the rise of Hitler?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Yes, the rise of Hitler and the fact that my parents both were interrogated just because they were Jews and their property was confiscated. My father actually was taken downtown by the Gestapo. He was made to scrub the streets. There are some pretty harrowing stories.

DAN OLSON: Did your parents adjust well to the United States?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I think it was very difficult because my father was an attorney, and when he came here, he couldn't speak English, so he lost his profession. He worked a variety of jobs, as most immigrants do. He swept out factories. He ground lenses, and eventually he set up a business as an importer exporter. And so that took quite a few years.

My mother, who had never even boiled water, suddenly found herself faced with a very different kind of life. She went to work in a butter factory, and then in a music type. She was a pianist, so she was better suited for that. And then after a few years, when my father did have a little business, she was able to stay home with me.

DAN OLSON: So the picture that is drawn here in the 2002 distinguished artist McKnight Foundation Publication is of this kid, you, sitting on the stoop reading the dictionary because you loved words. What was that all about?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I did always love words and books and stories, and I think my father played a large role in that. He love to talk about books. I collected comic books. And he said, all right, every time you give me 10 comic books, we'll go out and buy a book.

And then, of course, we went to the library together. But because he was such a good storyteller, he was very vivid in what he was able to communicate to me about the books he had enjoyed when he was growing up. And so he had read Mark Twain. He had read 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and other books by Jules Verne. And so we had a lot to talk about.

DAN OLSON: Did being the bookish kid in the neighborhood set you apart? Did kids pick on you, or did they make use of your knowledge?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: At first, you know, I was only almost 4 when we got there. And for a while I just wasn't going to speak English. Finally, it dawned on me that I had to speak English, if I wanted to communicate. And then I had to find my place in this, really, this group of girls.

We had a gang of girls maybe varying in age, and you kind of had to fight for your place. So I think it was learning, you know, of how to be a street kid, because during the years when my mother wasn't around, I had-- I was with a family who were my babysitters, but I was out on the street playing a lot of the time. And so I really grew up on the streets.

DAN OLSON: Now we're not-- are we talking pretty rough kids shoving each other around, getting into scrapes and--

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Oh, yes, hair pulling. People whacking and shoving and so forth. So I mean-- I mean physical fighting.

DAN OLSON: A side of Emilie Buchwald, probably not too many people associate with you now.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Well I'm not generally known for it these days.

DAN OLSON: Emilie Buchwald, among her other duties at Milkweed Editions, she's an editor. She's the person who helps authors find the best structure and the best words for their stories. Buchwald explains that often means asking writers to rethink, rewrite, and discard.

How many manuscripts does Milkweed Editions get a year from authors who want to be published?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: We receive about 3,000 manuscripts. And in addition to that, we receive a number of queries. So we are constantly looking at unsolicited manuscripts and we welcome them. That's part of our job as a literary nonprofit press to look at work by new writers. And many of the books we've published successfully over the years have been by emerging writers. These are debuts for writers who have gone on to become successful, not only published by us, but published by commercial houses.

DAN OLSON: How do you do it? Can you tell now fairly quickly within a couple of minutes, you read the lede and you think, wow, that one's not going to make it? That's in the out pile.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I think after years of reading manuscripts, and remember that I was a college teacher for a long time and I read a lot of writing during that period of time, one can tell fairly soon whether it's a literary manuscript. And then if you are excited by it, you go on and read more. And if you are really lucky, you're reading till the very end and you're thrilled. And that, of course, is what we're looking for. We're looking for that response of being thrilled.

DAN OLSON: Really? Some of the manuscripts, very few, I assume, come to you in such good shape that you actually just go right through them and are quite excited by them.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Excited by the talent of the writer. The manuscript may have a long way to go, but the talent of the writer emerges invariably.

DAN OLSON: What's the range of quality you're getting these days? How does it rate with what you've seen over the years?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: It doesn't change much. I think it is-- it's going to be true. And probably any of the arts that there are going to be some practitioners whose work strikes you as superlative. And you know, that these are people who have a career as writers.

DAN OLSON: So what happens in the editing process? Does stuff really get torn apart and reassembled?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Often. Often that happens. You know, one of the real pleasures of my work is to talk to writers, to talk to them about their manuscript and to say, you know, you've done such a wonderful thing with this character, what happened to the other character who you introduced early on. And can we see more of that character. Or the sequence of events here doesn't seem to be as clear as it could be.

So first, I would begin by looking at the manuscript, architecturally. Does it hold together? Does it have a sound structure. And so we begin by looking at that. And then if it's fiction, of course, characters are everything because characters move the plot. And character driven fiction is the most arresting and not only the most successful, I think, but the most lasting kind.

DAN OLSON: What happens when a writer says, no, wait, you can't touch that, that phrase or that section is sacred to me, the writer. And I don't want you-- I don't want you touching it.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: What's really been interesting to me over the years is that the better the writer, the more interested the writer is in feedback and in discussing back and forth why something works or why something doesn't work. Because the aim of the writer is to produce the best possible finished product, the best possible book that he or she is capable of. And my job is not to take over the manuscript.

My job is to be the writer's outside eye, the eye that looks a little more coolly at what's on the page and is able to point out what can be changed and what the writer can do differently. And so over the years, I've really never had anyone say to me, no, I won't do that. They'll say, well, wait a minute. I really like it that way, why-- what makes you think, you know. And then we start talking. And I'm not out to change anybody's fixed opinion. I'm out to ask them to think further about something.

DAN OLSON: Naturally, I'd love you to name names, but-- but I don't need you to do that. If you'll remember some memorable exchanges over what some of us might consider fairly itsy points.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Well, there's really nothing that's too itsy, I guess I would say. Because after the discussion about structure and character, there's the discussion about line editing, about the sentences, the words, the word choices in the sentences, because it all adds up. You know, the finished book is the result of hundreds and hundreds of choices deliberately made. And so I would say that I'm very willing to go back and forth with a writer on points that I think would help to make that manuscript better.

DAN OLSON: So your advice to writers, what should they do if they want to be published by Milkweed Editions?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: General advice to writers, and I think most writers already are aware of this, is to be avid readers, to read for style as well as for content to become really familiar with the work of master stylists, stylists of their choice. People different kinds of books. It doesn't really matter. It's being aware of how much has gone into the writing of any particular book.

And so, you know, to read a book two or three times that they like to take a paragraph or two, see how it's constructed, see what makes it happen, recognize the fact that the writer has a distinctive voice. So I'd say, it's not that you want to copy another writer, but learn that each individual writer has struggled and has found his or her voice. So after that, find your voice, your unique voice. And it helps if you have something to say.

The most important advice I can give is have a body of knowledge. It's so refreshing to read a book where not only are you thrilled by the literary quality of the work, but you're learning something as you go forward. For instance, a couple of examples. I was just looking again at Snow Falling on Cedars and I was thinking how much Guterson knows about boats, about fishing ships, and about catching salmon. You know, the details are marvelously rendered.

And a recent book by Jane Smiley called Horse Heaven, which is entirely about horses and horse racing, is thrilling in that it gives you an intimate knowledge-- someone's intimate knowledge of what it means to own a horse, to race a horse, to train a horse, what it's like to go to a racetrack, what does it mean to be a jockey, for instance. And she could not have written that book without a whole world of information behind her.

And so I think when I tell writers have something to say, not only have something to say, but be an expert in it. Be so aware of the background of what you're saying that you could write a little biography of each character that you're creating, that you could draw a map of the landscape that you're describing so that you have exactly in your mind these human beings you want to bring to life. And so that your book feels realized in every sense.

DAN OLSON: Listening to that makes me feel not very many people who would like to be writers have all that much to say or have done all of those things you've just described.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: The good thing about writing is that can continue to learn. I think if you are truly dedicated to becoming a writer and recognize that it means taking pains, you can do that. You can be a writer at 80. And there are writers-- I'm trying to remember when Joseph Conrad began to write his novels in English, but he was fairly advanced in years. And there are a number of writers who grow in their art. And it's much better to grow than to shrink or diminish.

DAN OLSON: You're listening to a Voices of Minnesota conversation with Emilie Buchwald on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson. Buchwald is a founder of Milkweed Editions, the Minneapolis-based, nonprofit organization publishes nonfiction, poetry, literature for young people, and books about the natural world and the environment Among her other duties at Milkweed, Buchwald is the person who says no to writers whose work doesn't measure up.

Now, I don't mean this question sarcastically at all. I'm quite serious when I ask this. Do you have a collection of stock phrases for letting people down gently? Dan, I know you can grow, if you'll just take a little more time to study this-- this piece you're trying to write.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Fortunately, I don't have to look most writers in the eye and say that. Although, I have done that. And I think one of the most difficult parts of my job is that I have to say no more than 90% of the time. And that I hate. I like to say yes. And I'm not able to. So we do it by sending letters and rejection letters back to writers.

And I know it's not satisfying, but what I found is early on, I would actually give people comments when they asked for them. And invariably, they were angry. They were angry because I presumed to criticize their work and I hadn't accepted it. And so I've learned a very painfully along the way that it is a mistake to do that. And at least, so it seems to me.

DAN OLSON: So just reject them and say good luck to you.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Well, you know, the idea is to say that someone else might like their work, because the other piece of advice I would give to a writer that is not to be disheartened. If you think you're good and someone has rejected you or 15 or 20 people have rejected you because those people can be wrong. As many successful writers have pointed out, they've papered their room with rejection letters, and the great delight is in proving those people wrong who rejected their work.

DAN OLSON: Tell me your take on the commercial publishing houses. I can't tell where we are in our literary history in the United States at this point, self-help, cooking, memoir, where are we, Emilie?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Well, of course, commercial houses will always publish, I would say, some of the most exciting literary work because they can pay for it, and more power to them and to the writers that they publish. Because we want writers to earn as they should. However, having said that, I would say that they hedged their bets. In addition to publishing some very fine literary books, they publish a lot of books to pay the bills because they found that they can't make a living by publishing literature. And that's why it's a relatively small part of their publishing program.

They publish books that they think will sell, so they do publish the cookbooks, the repair-- the home repair manuals, the latest gardening book, the new version of how to be rich and thin. You know, that's a perennial. There's always a book like that. And then the television biography, and, you know, they will publish 200, 300, 500 titles a year, hoping that out of those titles will come some books that will pay for all the others and that will make them a lot of money. And that, of course, is their right and their job.

DAN OLSON: Do you spend much time trying to figure out the American psyche by charting what's being published, if murder mysteries go from the cozies to the more slasher oriented vein, does that tell you that we're a more violent nation or anything like that?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: We are a violent nation, but human beings are a violent species, and I don't think there's any way of getting around that. All you have to do is look at what sells, not only in book publishing, but in other media to know that that's true. However, it doesn't have much meaning for Milkweed Editions in the sense that we take the opposite perspective.

Instead of saying to ourselves what sells, or what sells this year, or what will sell next year, we say, what is good writing, what's good literature, what deserves to be between covers, what might last, what might become part of the weave of American culture, you know, how is this talented writer going to be represented in the future. So that's our perspective.

DAN OLSON: Has moviemaking and the purchase of book rights for movies, has that greatly changed the style of writing, or has it had any effect on the style of writing in this country?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I'm sure it has. I read many manuscripts, which almost are film scripts or television script sets. They're very cinematic and you can have a very good book that is very cinematic if the writing is exciting enough. But the heart of good literature has always been to examine through words, not only the dialogue but also the surroundings, also the larger picture of what's going on in the society.

And a good film can certainly do that. But, you know, as I look at films, for instance, I'm going to see White Oleander, which has just been released, but I don't think it will approach the book by Janet Fitch, which is so darkly compelling and so well written.

And certainly, when I look at The Forsythe Saga on television, which is being very interestingly adapted, and I remember the earlier version on masterpiece theater as well, I have read The Forsythe Saga, and there is no way that those very good television adaptations are going to give you the glory of the book and-- oh, the books, I should say, because there are a number of them. And the glory is the language.

DAN OLSON: Do you have a novel of your own tucked away somewhere in the drawer that you're working on privately, quietly?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: The answer is no. And if I were doing that, I'd probably be remiss because there's so much to do in publishing that the same kind of creative activity that goes into writing really does go into editing and publishing. And if you're not giving at the office, you're not doing your job. So as long as I am here at Milkweed Editions, I'm not likely to go back to being a writer. And I must tell you that I admire the writers I've worked with so much. It's been just a tremendous joy for me to, you know, to have worked with so many marvelous writers.

DAN OLSON: Have you reached a point in your role as editor with some authors where you've seen the book published-- Milkweed perhaps has published the book, and you've thought to yourself, gee, you know, I wrote that book as much as the author?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I would never dare to imagine that. But it's nice to know that I've contributed. It's nice to know that the writer feels I've given that book real attention, loving attention, I guess I would say, and that I have thought about that book in a very intense way, probably a very obsessional way during the time that I was editing it. And so that's my part of it. But it's not my book.

DAN OLSON: You're a poet and a poetry lover at heart. You're, of course, also a published writer in your own right. You already referred to your time as a college professor. I think this McKnight Publication, where you've been awarded the 2002 distinguished artist by the McKnight Foundation, this book contains a poem, "The Dream of Now" by William Stafford. Tell us about this poem. You like it. What do you like about it?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I love this poem. I loved it when I first read it back in 1980. And I just have to say that William Stafford, who was then already a very well established poet, was extremely kind. He was flying through Minneapolis, and I had called him and said, we're starting a new journal, would you help us? Would you help us with finding writers? Do you have any ideas for us, any suggestions?

And so he suggested that we meet in the Minneapolis airport and we spent several hours together talking. He opened his address book, he gave me names, he gave me addresses, a very generous, large souled individual. And even more wonderful, he allowed us to print two of his poems in the first issue of Milkweed Chronicle. "The Dream of Now" was one of them.

DAN OLSON: Would you read it for us?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I would love to. "The Dream of Now." "When you wake to the dream of now from night and its other dream, you carry day out of the dark like a flame. When spring comes North and flowers unfold from Earth and its even sleep, you lift summer on with your breath lest it be lost ever so deep. Your life you live by the light you find and follow it on as well as you can, carrying through darkness wherever you go, your one little fire that will start again."

I love that poem. I love that poem in its description of the human condition. Its understanding that we are always trying to figure out where we are in our lives, where we've come from, where we might be going. Recognizing that we're going to stumble and fail and fall. And if we can hold that one little fire and recognize that we can light it again, it offers human beings hope in the darkness that many of us recognize is an essential part of human existence.

DAN OLSON: Emilie Buchwald, thank you so much. A pleasure to talk with you.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Thank you. I've enjoyed it.

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DAN OLSON: Emilie Buchwald, founder of Milkweed Editions, a Minneapolis-based publisher. She's the winner of this year's McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award. You're listening to our Voices of Minnesota interview series on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

Author Mary Winstead discovered a family secret while writing her book Back to Mississippi, a personal journey through the events that changed America in 1964. One of the events was the murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. Winstead discovered a distant family relative is the alleged mastermind of the murders. The man has escaped prosecution.

In her book, Winstead doesn't try to uncover new evidence of his involvement. Instead, she describes growing up in a nearly all White Minneapolis neighborhood and then discovering her connection with Mississippi, the South, and a person who allegedly plays a central role in one of the Civil Rights movement's darkest moments. Along the way, her book includes humorous and touching accounts of her family, including her father.

Why did you decide to write a book about your father's family from Mississippi?

MARY WINSTEAD: I think it really began when I was-- about 20 years ago, when my youngest daughter was just a baby, and I was taking her to Mississippi with my father because they wanted to meet her, which is sort of a family tradition. And when we got there, I saw that the Mississippi that my father had been talking to me about all my life and telling wonderful stories about was vanishing.

And, for example, little things like people didn't sit on the front porch after dinner and talk anymore. Now they met Saturday afternoons behind the shopping carts at Walmart. Or instead of making this wonderful fried chicken that I remembered my aunts making as a child that was so scrumptious and mouthwatering, it was coming from Colonel Sanders. And just some of those cultural things. This lovely farm area where my aunts and uncles had lived was being sold off and built up housing developments, shopping malls, and that sort of thing.

So I realized that unless I preserved my father's memories on paper, that world would vanish from our family history. And I just felt that would be too great of a loss. So I began to write down his stories. My dad's a natural born storyteller. He grew up in the Mississippi of the 1920s and '30s. His parents were sharecroppers. He left Mississippi to join the Marines at the onset of World War II, and met my mother in Washington, DC. My mother's a Minnesota native.

DAN OLSON: Was it a bet your father made with a fellow Marine as they were talking about how many girls they could-- young women they could get to wait at a corner, at the intersection?

MARY WINSTEAD: That's right. My dad and his Marine buddies, when they were in Washington, he was there recovering from malaria. And once he was well enough to be out and about, which wasn't too long, he and his Marine buddies would make bets on Saturday nights to see who could get the most girls to wait under a particular tree. And my father always won the bet. And this is how he-- this is one of the ways that he attracted my mother because she was one of the young women under the tree.

DAN OLSON: What kind of line did this guy use? What did he say to these young women?

MARY WINSTEAD: I have no idea what he said. That-- those lines are lost-- lost to history, but that story is really emblematic of my dad. He's a hilarious person, a wonderful storyteller and has a swift and ready wit.

DAN OLSON: Who is Preacher Ed Killen?

MARY WINSTEAD: It's Edgar Ray Killen. Preacher Edgar Ray Killen is a family member. He's a cousin of my father's whom I have never met. And not-- I'm not sure if I ever really wanted to. Although when doing research for my book, had he been available, I would have appreciated talking with him. But Preacher Edgar Ray Killen is alleged because murder charges have never been brought up in this particular case. But he's alleged to have masterminded the 1964 murders of the Civil Rights workers Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney in Neshoba county, Mississippi, where my dad grew up.

DAN OLSON: And you did not, or did you start out writing a memoir of the family, or did it evolve into a book about not only the family but about 1964, the murders, and civil rights?

MARY WINSTEAD: What I decided to do when I was writing these stories about my dad and his family and these lovely, charming memories of fishing for chickens and switching babies in the backs of wagons and lovely stories, I decided that I really needed to do a little bit of background research into the state of Mississippi, its political history, cultural history, racial history, because I realized that I was sort of impoverished in that way.

There were so many things that I didn't know. I didn't know how to put these stories in context. So in the course of my research, I had known that this Freedom Summer, during which the three civil rights workers were murdered, had begun in Neshoba County and that they had been murdered not far away from where my dad grew up. But what I didn't know, and I discovered through my research, was that Edgar Ray Killen, who's alleged to have masterminded the murders, was my father's cousin.

DAN OLSON: But a distant cousin, apparently. However, even no matter how distant, I gather, you took it very personally.

MARY WINSTEAD: I took it very personally because as you get to these small communities, everyone is related to everyone else. And so I would be in a cafe with a cousin and everyone in the cafe would be related to me in one way or another. And everybody knew who was sick, and who had died, and who was starting school in the fall, and whether or not so-and-so got over the measles.

And so Edgar Ray Killen, I believe, is my dad's second cousin. And so even those-- it's a cultural-- it's a cultural context in which kin is everything. And so that, it really doesn't matter if you're sixth kin or second cousins, seven times removed, kin are kin and blood is very, very important.

DAN OLSON: Apparently, as you found as you write in the book Back to Mississippi, when you visited your kin, they, well, how would you describe it, accepted you with open arms?

MARY WINSTEAD: That's exactly right. We were not a family who traveled a lot. My parents just didn't have the kind of money that other families in our neighborhood had for us to take family vacations. But in 1966, my dad was able to buy his first new car. And we took our first trip to Mississippi. And we really-- what I remember most vividly from that trip is the welcome, the warm, and loving, and unconditional love that we received day in and day out.

I remember my father saying that my little sister Liz, who was five years old, was carried so much that her feet never touched the ground from the time she landed in Mississippi till the time we left. And that was it. It was, I think, coming from a more reserved Scandinavian Minnesota community and environment, it was really-- it was such a contrast. And it was wonderfully surprising and very, very enjoyable.

And my siblings talk about it to this day. In fact, we talk about even now how wonderfully they treat their elderly relatives and how they care for them and take off work to go care for them and sit with them through the night at the hospital. And we often look at each other and say, are we as nice as they are. And we realize that, well, it's an ideal that we'd like to live up to, but we sort of fall a little short.

DAN OLSON: Your book, Back to Mississippi, A Personal Journey Through the Events that Changed America In 1964 is a very steady drumbeat of sorrow and tragedy, but certainly not unrelenting. I mean, we must ask you about your father's storytelling. And the fishing for chickens story is one that just leaps out. How do you fish for chickens?

MARY WINSTEAD: Well, first you have to picture my dad in the front yard of our little South Minneapolis bungalow. And on the front lawn is our little blue plastic wading pool. It's a hot summer night and my dad is in his shorts. And he's sitting up to his waist in the pool. So this is the first thing you have to just picture in your mind.

And he's got a couple of beers in the water keeping them cool. And then every once in a while he takes the church key that he's got on a chain hanging around his neck with his Marine Corps dog tags and he opens up a beer. So this is how you start it out. And then the neighbors would be sitting in their lawn chairs in a circle around my dad, and he would regale them with stories.

Fishing for chickens is the way you fish for chickens is you climb up to the top of the chicken coop with a bamboo fishing pole and a string. At the end of the string you've tied some corn, and then you lower the fishing pole down into the chicken coop. And the chickens, of course, think that the corn is on the ground, so they swallow it.

And then you just haul that chicken up to the roof, one after one, until you've got all the chickens up on the roof. And then, of course, your mother comes out and screams and then and then everybody, you know, then they chase you into the woods because they want to, you know, get you with a Hickory stick or something like that. So that's how you fish for chickens.

DAN OLSON: Mary Winstead, she's the author of the new book Back to Mississippi, A Personal Journey Through the Events that Changed America in 1964. You're listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson. Winstead says, she wrote about her family's connection with the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers because she believes America is forgetting the history of the era. Her Mississippi relatives claim no connection with Edgar Ray Killen.

Why didn't your family members from Neshoba county, Mississippi, claim Preacher Edgar Ray Killen as kin, as family? Why didn't they claim him?

MARY WINSTEAD: Once we began to-- once I began to ask some questions, that was, of course, the first comment about Edgar Ray Killen was, well, we don't claim him. And our conversations sort of halted after that. We didn't have too much communication. But this is what I-- this is what I have come to believe. And that's that by not claiming someone, you're distancing yourself from an event, from the guilt, from the shame, from the embarrassment. And by distancing yourself, then you don't have to deal with it because then it's not-- it's no longer there.

So when I heard that, and then I realized that we weren't-- that our relationship was probably going to fall apart if I was going to continue to write the book in the vein that it was-- in the tenor that it was now taking, I saw that I really needed to claim him. And at one point in the book, I say, by claiming the monster in our midst, I discovered the monsters in myself. And what I mean by that is that I began to take a look at the community that I was raised in, which I was raised.

So often in Minnesota at parties or gatherings with large groups of people, if the topic comes up about regarding civil rights, or integration, or progressive race relations, people often congratulate themselves. And yet when I would look around the room, I would realize, you know, this is a White group, this is a White upper middle class group. And then I looked at the community in which I was raised and I saw we lived in segregated communities.

We lived in a White, solidly middle class neighborhood, Catholic neighborhood where there wasn't any difference, where it really took me to be 13 years old and traveling to Mississippi for the first time before I really came in firsthand contact with a person of color. And so I started to look at issues like White privilege, even silly sounding things like the color of band-aids. You know, we're the same color as my skin or flesh colored crayons in grade school that were the color of my flesh. But then more serious issues.

For example, I started to see that when I was a little kid and I would go into the drugstore after school with a gang of friends, the druggist didn't watch us. He didn't watch us. And I've heard from so many other people who are people of color that that's not the same case for them. This is a different-- this is a different experience. And I began to see that there were so many different Americas, Americas that I was not aware of.

DAN OLSON: You grew up in a segregated environment, as you point out, here in Minnesota. And interestingly, maybe ironically, your Mississippi relatives were growing up in a sort of integrated environment, except there was a very high degree of separation of the races.

MARY WINSTEAD: The relationships that I saw were relationships of patronage, where my aunt and uncle owned a large farm, very prosperous farm, and had many, many people working for them on the farm. Many of them people of color who lived in very small shacks and who came and worked at the house. And in terms of being treated kindly, yes, it's true. They were treated very kindly. There weren't harsh words. There wasn't harsh punishment. But it was still that system of patronage. It was still a Black person serving a White person.

DAN OLSON: How did you become so interested in the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner? One of them, James Chaney, from the general area, two of them from way outside Mississippi. How did you decide and why did you decide to fold them into your story?

MARY WINSTEAD: I think when I discovered that this second cousin of my father's, Edgar Ray Killen, was alleged to have masterminded these murders, and when I say that I had read extensively about this, the Freedom Summer that took place in 1964 in Mississippi, because of what had happened and because we had never talked about it. I was fascinated by the fact that we did not discuss it at home.

Now, it's interesting. My mother now says yes, Mary, we did, because I'm not sure-- I'm not sure that she feels really great about the fact that we didn't. But it became apparent to me that was part of this segregated community. It was segregated not only by race and class, but was also segregated by ideals, if you will. Good people who went to church and every Sunday and loved their kids and voted on election day.

But somehow the environment in which we were raised was one where you didn't get involved. It's not our fight. This is happening someplace else. And as I continue to do my research and get deeper and deeper into the Freedom Summer and to the murders, I began to see how, at least in my view, there's sort of a triangle when it comes to really making, being able to make change.

And one side of the triangle is the people who want to maintain the status quo. The other side of the triangle is the people who are really trying to fight the status quo and bring about change. And then at the bottom are the people who are the bystanders. And it occurred to me that the people who were trying to make changes really could have been so much more effective had the people who were on the sidelines decided to take action.

You know, how much more would we have known about it? How much more difficult would it have been to carry out a midnight murder? How much more successful would that voting registration drive have been, if you could have mobilized an entire country to speak out against the absence of civil rights, speak out for what was happening in terms of the Civil Rights movement? Does that make sense?

DAN OLSON: I think, as you say, a lot of Northern Whites feel that it wasn't-- It isn't our battle, the battle against racism, because after all, we live in a very progressive environment in the North here, don't we? You've already said, you've changed your mind on that, apparently.

MARY WINSTEAD: Well, I think I really have, because what I-- one of the people who I got to while I was writing the book was Andrew Goodman's mother, Carolyn Goodman, who lives in New York city, who's 87 years old and who just a couple of years ago was arrested for protesting the Amadou Diallo murder in New York City.

So here's a woman who's been an activist. Her entire life, lives in a very progressive community on New York's Upper West Side. And when I was speaking to her, I really saw how from the time she was a young girl, she was raised in an environment of activism.

And so that's how she and her husband raised their family. They did not see the activities in other parts of the country or even the world as somebody else's battle. They saw it as their own battle because it was a battle to free Americans from the repression that had prevented them from being able to vote, having equal opportunity in education, and so on.

DAN OLSON: She was very gracious to you, inviting you into her Manhattan apartment to talk with you about her son, Andrew Goodman, and about the family. And then what was her reaction when you told her that you are a distant relative of Preacher Edgar Ray Killen, the alleged mastermind of the murders?

MARY WINSTEAD: At first, she looked-- she had a look of shock on her face. And I sort of didn't want to tell her because I was afraid that it might harm our relationship. But once she got over her initial surprise, then she started to ask me questions instead. So the interview sort of turned around and she was able to find out from me what my purpose was in talking with her, what my purpose was in writing the book, and what my goals were in terms of including these murders and her son's memory in my memoir. And once we were able to really out those issues, our relationship really flourished. And I felt as though we had established a tremendous bond of trust.

DAN OLSON: She didn't know you that well. She didn't know how you were using the memory of her son.

MARY WINSTEAD: No, she didn't until we actually sat down and talked about it. We had had an extensive interview, but then she really wanted to know, as a family member, you know, what was going to happen with this. So I shared with her as I was writing the book, and I let her know what my process was, who I was talking to.

And she was actually not involved in the writing, but certainly in reviewing drafts, because I wanted her to know that I had every intention of honoring his memory and the memory of the two other young men who were murdered, because I felt as though, if it's true and all fingers point to Edgar Ray Killen that he did mastermind these murders, the truth is, he's never been brought to justice. He's still running around free. Murder charges have never been brought.

So how do I, as a family member, even begin to think about a way to bring about a certain measure of healing or restitution or amends? And so I felt as though there was something about writing this book that brings it back into the spotlight a little bit. There are conversations now taking place in book groups about this unresolved murder case that took place almost 40 years ago. And so for me, that's gratifying because it's as though I am honoring the memory of her son.

DAN OLSON: If Preacher Edgar Ray Killen is not charged before he dies, if he is not brought to what some people consider justice, will that stall the healing? Will healing not take place as a result?

MARY WINSTEAD: I don't pretend to be an expert on these kinds of things. I think that the shame of it would be-- the door would always be closed and it would be very difficult then to go back and open it up and to find out what really happened to have the truth in front of us. And as one of the newspaper editors in Mississippi that I interviewed said that people want to close the door on the past and say, you know, it's almost 40 years ago, can't we just let it drop? Why can't we just move on?

And I agree with him when he says that we can't move on until we have sat with this and looked at it and said, this is what happened. We're sorry. Now, the people who did it have been brought to justice and now we can move on. And so if it doesn't happen, my fear is that then it will just get forgotten.

And, you know, when you think about the other civil rights murders, the Birmingham bombing, for example, where the four little girls were killed, the murder of Medgar Evers and then of Vernon Dahmer all of those Klansmen who planned and committed those murders have been tried and convicted and put in jail.

And I think for some-- for whatever way that the healing process occurs, I think the fact that those public events have taken place, it's almost a ritual or a ceremony. I think that it helps sort of even heal the public consciousness about it. It's like, yes, OK, now we can put this to rest because now we have completed our business.

DAN OLSON: Among northern Whites who read your account, what kind of a reaction do you get about the distance that you've already talked about, the geographic distance and the time distance of these events, and about what, I guess, is maybe a northern attitude that, well, that didn't happen here. It couldn't happen here, Mary.

MARY WINSTEAD: What's interesting for me, and I've been attending several book clubs and delighted to do so, where the conversation begins to be, you know, Mary, when I was growing up, my parents moved us away from the city and to the suburbs, and I didn't realize until I was an adult that it was because they wanted to live in a segregated suburb.

Or conversations that have to do with, you know, Mary, when I was in school, we didn't have African-Americans in our school, and I didn't realize that it was because we lived in a gated-- a community that had a covenant and that there was a different covenant across the river where, you know, where people could go to school.

And so it's I think in some ways shedding new light for us, especially the White community, that our childhoods really were impoverished of diversity. Our childhoods really were separate Americas from the Americas of people of color and when we look back, I think, to me, there's a loss there. There's a piece of personal and collective development that did not occur because of that impoverishment. And those are the kinds of discussions that are taking place. And I'm thrilled about that. To me, that means a great deal.

DAN OLSON: Mary Winstead, a pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for your time.

MARY WINSTEAD: Thank you very much. It was my pleasure too.

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DAN OLSON: Mary Winstead, author of the new book Mississippi Burning, A Personal Journey Through the Events that Changed America in 1964. You've been listening to Voices of Minnesota on Minnesota Public Radio. I'm Dan Olson.

MIKE EDGERLY: And this is Midday coming to you on Minnesota Public Radio. A reminder that coming your way tonight, we'll rebroadcast Former President Jimmy Carter's Nobel acceptance speech today. He gave that after accepting the award in Oslo, Norway. That will come your way at 9:00 tonight, followed by a discussion of human rights with Barbara Frey, U of M professor in the School of Law. That comes your way at 9 o'clock tonight.

Programming is supported by Northern Brewer home brewing supplies on Grand avenue, offering products for beer and wine makers, including starter kits for beginners online at northernbrewer.com. The state forecast today calls for mostly sunny skies. The highs around 40 degrees. Sunny skies again tomorrow around the state. The highs 42 to 48.

SPEAKER 2: On the next All Things Considered in honor of International Human Rights day, we'll find out what Minnesotans are doing in the name of peace. It's All Things Considered weekdays at 3:00 on Minnesota Public Radio, KNOW FM, 91.1.

MIKE EDGERLY: You're listening to Minnesota Public Radio. We have mostly sunny skies, 39 degrees at KNOW FM, 91.1, Minneapolis, Saint Paul. Twin Cities weather for this afternoon, the highs reaching the upper 40s tonight. Clear the low only 30 degrees for tomorrow. Partly cloudy skies. The highs in the mid 40s. And then for Thursday, the highs in the upper seconds. It's 1 o'clock.