Tag Archives: Minnesota Cold

Of What We Remember

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

In decades past, around ten in the morning on Memorial Day, the veterans of foreign wars marched down Main Street in our small town with the high school band, tractors from the local implement dealer, the mayor in a convertible, the Knights of Columbus and enough other groups to call the gathering a parade. Many came in from the surrounding farms to line the streets then follow the marchers to the fairgrounds for a town picnic.

That’s the belief system I in which grew up. The Vietnam War tested Memorial Day. Vietnam vets weren’t welcome in the feel good ceremonies. VFW posts frequently didn’t allow Vietnam vets membership for all kinds of sad reasons. Vietnam vets changed from their uniforms to street clothes before leaving the airport at discharge, were spat at on the street by anti-war protesters who confused fellow citizens with policy makers, were let go from jobs by ignorant folks who called them wicked names.

One Memorial Day weekend my employer sent me to a national editorial association meeting in New Orleans. I was young and excited about the trip, but also sad about missing our traditional holiday gathering. I asked another attendee why the conference had been scheduled on this weekend. Southern born she gave me a sixty- second history of how her family considered Memorial Day a Yankee holiday to rub defeat in the faces of Confederate states.

There have always been divisions in this large nation. Sometimes the schism is about human rights, sometimes about policies too onerous for one large group of people to accept, often about disparity in the quality of the illusive American Experience. Television was blamed for delivering the Vietnam War to families’ living rooms and for pushing the curtains back on civil injustice. Social media has the praise or curses for changing the tone of political discourse today.

What do we remember on Memorial Day?

When veterans were asked to stand during the St. Paul Saints baseball game yesterday I felt the same quiet tears begin that I’ve experienced since September 11, 2001. Old and young, male and female, they raised a hand. Shoulders were set, chests puffed, heads held proud. Rightfully so.

It would be comforting to believe these brave citizens could continue to protect our country against divisiveness within, sinking respect abroad, and the powerful war weapons of nuclear devices, digital mayhem, and men greedy for their own power.

“Life played a giant joke on those of us living unassuming lifestyles twenty years ago. When the men who played with power ordered those who played with destruction to send out their weapons, billions suffered.” — Minnesota Cold

I say that I write speculative fiction to deal with what I fear about the future. Minnesota Cold was written ten years ago about a time ten years from now.

If only everyone from Washington, D.C. to the people living in our neighborhoods can remember what we hold in common, find our way to shaking hands, and talking about a common future over a plate of picnic foods. On Memorial Day, we could honor the sacrifices of the past by building for a better future.

Winter Stillness

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

Rabbit tracks are the only interruption of a stretch of yesterday’s snow stretching from my window to a neighbor’s stone garden walls. Lines of sparkling white rest on the bare tree branches that fracture a cloudless blue sky. Sunshine is decorative when the temperature stops climbing.

As a writing prompt snow has a lengthy positive playlist—a blanket hiding all that is gray, an invitation to be a child, flakes on lashes, a fairylike sparkling dust. And there are days when the snow prompt elicits other words—glaring cold hiding the garden’s green, icy curse on a safe journey, smothering the earth, driving animals further to find food, treacherous underfoot, frozen tundra, blinding, endless, isolating.

The newspapers this morning are filled with grave concerns about the future of our country. I am caught in an unhealthy ennui, held captive creatively, unable to find peaceful stillness. A sentence begins, crawls on screen, then my eyes return to the rabbit tracks on yesterday’s snow and wonder if the furry critter is nesting under the stones in my neighbor’s garden, what it eats in the winter, how badly the next four years might be. Will Minnesota Cold become my reality?

Mo Udall once said something like Reaganomics promised all people equal ice, but for the poor it would all come in the winter. And while our departing President challenges us to continue to hope, his words are tempered by the reality of the world where there is a whole lot of hostility and inequality.

If I wrote romances or mysteries instead of literary and speculative fiction, winter might be easier. Passion and puzzles sound like better mental escapes than thinking about emotional change or dystopia.

Frightened Off Station Eleven

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

Following New Year’s celebrations in Door County, I celebrated by going to bed early and watching a movie. The next morning I woke up feverish, the first day of what would be a four-week journey through bacterial and viral mysteries. Maybe it was the flu. Maybe not.

“You know, if we were living a hundred and fifty years ago, I’d probably be dead,” I Paris museumdeclared deep into the second week when the unnamed illness turned into a sinus infection, an ear infection and swollen tonsils. My husband, who leans toward the “soldier on” philosophy of empathy, agreed and encouraged me to make a doctor appointment.

While sick I read my way through all the non-Ken Follett novels I had received as holiday gifts. Fever and a constant headache placed Follett’s thousand page volumes in the same category as learning a new language or understanding articles in The Economist. Marilynne Robinson, Maeve Binchy and Emma Straub filled my hours. Then I began Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven.

Back to that certainty that in the days before antibiotics, Tylenol and throat lozenges, I might have been a dead person. In the spirit of full disclosure, I think I told my husband if the crud took me in 2015, I wanted to be cremated.

IMG_0349In Door County, Wisconsin, where this story began, there is a joke that Peninsula State Park will one day be lined by memorial benches and ankle deep in the ashes of visitors and residents who cannot bear to spend eternity anywhere else.

I am perplexed about what is to be done with the ashes of loved ones. Urns behind glass in mausoleums give me an odd feeling. Urns on the bookshelves of friends make me wonder what happens when the Boomer generation passes and grandkids are left with an increasing number of urns holding their grandparents and their parents. I am aware of people carrying a small vial of a loved one’s ashes. My mother-in-law asked that hers be spread over her gardens. Four pounds of ash is not an insignificant amount of material.

With most of the world dying in Mandel’s book, the whole ashes disposal question is moot. When sick with the ever-changing illness, Station Eleven was not a good choice for passing the time. In the dark of my nights, Mandel’s quick killing Georgia flu seemed plausible. Two days and over two hundred pages into Station Eleven I closed my e-reader to ponder whether I would want to be a survivor of such a pandemic or die. After fifteen or thirty minutes of such wondering I knew I would not finish the book. Margaret Atwood, PD James, Cormac McCarthy and James Howard Kunstler have not bothered my sleep in worse times. But I wouldn’t sleep with Mandel’s story in my mind.

As a writer of speculative fiction, I’ve stewed for weeks about catastrophes that could alter the world. I write of things I fear might happen—nuclear missteps, military encounters, financial collapse, uncontrolled corporate growth. Mandel’s work is brilliant. Last week, fully healthy, I carried her book to the gym, set the elliptical machine on thirty minutes and read another forty pages. Over the next days I managed another forty. Close to the end, I walked away once more. To finish the book would be worse than my decision to watch Contagion while flying home from Paris. This year I’m piling up magazines, chick lit and historical fiction in case my flu shot is ineffective. Nothing stronger.

How the Family Reads

Cynthia Kraack Posted on by

My father thought he found himself in a character in Minnesota Cold, my first novel. Before release of The High Cost of Flowers I spoke with each member of our family to make sure they knew this book was not about us. My writing group asked what my husband thought of a short story about an unfaithful wife. Not to worry, he doesn’t read my work. But more important, I am a fiction writer. This wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about him. It was a story.

Laurie Hertzel, Senior Editor/Books of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and author of the memoir It’s All News to Me: Adventures of an Accidental Journalist, wrote about how family members approached reading a series of blog posts that focused on childhood memories. She said some members read with interest, some with anxiety, some with disapproval. With memoir project research collecting in a folder, I’m both curious and cautious about how other’s memories of an event might differ from mine. Trained as a journalist I’m looking for the comfort of facts even though stories of our family might be the guts of the book.

I admit my twentieth century great-grandmother inspired the twenty-first century protagonist of Minnesota Cold and that my father’s devoted caring for my mother, who suffered from dementia, influenced the development of Art in The High Cost of Flowers. flowers-cover-200Writing a memoir about the actual lives of these two individuals will be challenging. The powerful influence of familiar people, places and experiences in writing is reflected in AWP 2015’s first day schedule that includes three sessions on the topic. I’ll be in attendance.

Among the fears that held me back from publishing, offending somebody dear to me ranked fairly high. More than once I’ve read that if you can’t get over that concern you need to do something else. I’ve written five novels, but this memoir is clamoring for attention. Hopefully these AWP 2015 sessions will bring insights that help bolster my courage to take on a project that should be written.