The Minnesota of My Mind
Long before I became a writer, the first characters I ever studied—for a history paper in high school—were the rural Minnesotans of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. “All this working land was turned into exuberance by the light. The sunshine was dizzy on open stubble; shadows from immense cumulus clouds were forever sliding across low mounds; and the sky was wider and loftier and more resolutely blue than the sky of cities... ‘It's a glorious country; a land to be big in.’” Lewis wrote this of the Minnesota of his imagination; creating impressions that stayed with me until I came to Minnesota for college in 2006, and I was so captivated by its lakes and bike lanes and diversity of people that I stayed for twelve years. Years later, when I started to write my latest novel, I began to consider Minnesota as a setting in Lewis’s tradition: a perfect place to hold characters who are surrounded by landscapes and communities so beautiful, so quietly intoxicating they never want to move on—they never need to.
As I wrote, I let myself tesseract back to tall grass and wet air on late summer walks outside Chisago Lakes; the sight of everyone in a West Saint Paul dive bar turning in their seats to look at the entrance every time the hinges squeaked; the click of ice and wood cracking in the North woods; the smell of leaves burning in the fall; the bright smiles of coworkers (and the occasional judgment); the feeling of being dwarfed by St. Croix bluffs in a canoe; the grit between my toes among the soupy reeds of Cedar Lake; the taste of fresh whitefish; the silent weeping of formerly stoic Scandinavians at bar close; driving along the North Dakota border, lulled by an endless horizon of sugar beets.
On days off from my part-time job, I used to drink espresso and write all day at the Dunn Bros on 3rd Ave in Minneapolis. Sometimes I would move on to beer at Grumpy’s on Washington, holing up in the corner while karaoke blasted from the side room. In the summers, I would sit in the open air at Spyhouse, getting distracted from my Word document by eavesdropping on artsy couples while I chewed on half-melted iced coffee. When I lived in St. Paul, I found backroom booths in Cahoots or tried to arrive too early to Nina’s before the seats by the tall windows got taken. More than once in these places I would encounter a friend who was also writing a novel or a poem, a stranger who was finishing an article or a dissertation. We would step outside for breaks together, commiserate, and hop back into whatever worlds or ideas we were conjuring. These Twin Cities writing hubs sustained me, not only because of the caffeine or the chatter, but because I knew that I wasn’t the only artist working there on any given day.
In order to keep these Minnesota memories potent, they’ll have to stay memories for now—I’ve returned to my roots in Kansas. In my main character’s longing for a former life in her Minnesota farmhouse, I found in my own longing for the long days and nights alongside my fellow writers, coming home with a red nose from a chilly walk, smelling of coffee. I miss it with every sense I possess, the Minnesota both in and beyond my mind, both worthy of satire and worthy of praise. As I was once transported by Main Street, I hope that every time someone cracks open this book, they go there with me.
Lara Avery’s debut novel for adults, THE YEAR OF SECOND CHANCES (William Morrow, 2023), hit shelves on August 22, 2023. Available now wherever books are sold!