Alumni Association Home > Past Issues > 2007 > January-February 2007	Print View

The white-haired woman frowning at the produce prices in the grocery store. The farmer sitting alone with a burger and beer in a crowded tavern. The retired couple traveling across the country in a mobile home. They’re average folks, not glamorous or charismatic, the kind of people who tend to fade into the background. People whose everyday experiences, in our celebrity-obsessed society, may seem ordinary, even dull.

That is, until you meet them in a Will Weaver (B.A. ’72) story. In Sweet Land, Weaver’s new collection of 12 short stories, these unsung lives become dramatic and suspenseful, touching and poignant.

Weaver, who lives in Bemidji, Minnesota, knows these people, likes them, respects them, finds their feelings and activities worthy of attention. They’re the farmers, hunters, school kids, car salesmen, and retirees who occupy small towns, not just in the Midwest but across the country, and who are trying to adjust as change—economic, technological, cultural, personal—erodes their familiar surroundings.

Several of these stories are new, but most are selected from Weaver’s prize-winning 1989 collection, A Gravestone Made of Wheat, the title story of which was made into a recent movie titled Sweet Land. In that story, a grieving farmer wonders how to honor his deceased wife’s last wishes, as he looks back upon their years together on a prairie farm: “She lay down beside him in the hay and when her hair fell across his face and neck he knew he could not be dreaming. He also knew that few dreams could ever be better than this. And in his long life with Inge, none were.”

Most of the stories are similarly low-key, yet infused with their own quiet drama. A farmer gets a great deal on a mower at auction, then has to face the neighbor whose foreclosure made the deal possible. A woman living in a cheap prefab house sees her disappointment reflected in her favorite TV program, This Old House. A man takes his 10-year-old grandson to hang out with old-timers at his former local barber shop, savoring the chance to show the boy a bit of his past.

In the hands of a skilled storyteller, these unremarkable moments hold unseen depths of emotion: tension, disenchantment, gratitude, guilt, sorrow, love. In fact, the few stories that are more dramatic in the conventional sense—one involving a young con artist, another a hunting trip gone awry—are less successful than the stories about more everyday events. It’s as if ordinariness itself, once Weaver has peeled it back to reveal the feelings beneath it, is what makes these stories so moving.

Who knew that a farmer’s nervous watch on the sky, his years of saving and planning all dependent on rain holding off for a few more days, could be so suspenseful? Who knew that a creepy car salesman wooing the high-school crush he doesn’t realize is now married could be so heartbreaking? Who knew that a retired couple—she in her 60s, he in his 70s—making unplanned midday love in an ice-fishing shack could be so, well, sexy?

—Katy Read

Bookmarks

Minnesotans in the Movies
By Rolf Canton (B.A. ’69)
Nodin Press (2007)
An A-to-Z reference book of Minnesotans—those born in the state or who stayed awhile—who enjoyed time on the silver screen. Canton describes the careers of 94 film stars, including Tippi Hedren, brothers James Arness and Peter Graves, Jessica Lange, Vince Vaughn, and Kimberly Elise.

Secret Keeping
By John Prin (B.A. ’68)
New World Library (2006)
According to Prin, 1 in 15 people lives a secret life, hiding their addictions to gambling, shopping, pornography, drugs, or food or other habits from family and friends. Prin, an alcohol and drug counselor and recovering addict, profiles secret keepers, describes unhealthy secrets, and explains how to come clean.

A Shameful Act
By Taner Akcam
Metropolitan Books (2006)
Akcam, an associate professor of history at the University of Minnesota, is one of the few Turkish historians to acknowledge the Armenian genocide and one of the first scholars to uncover evidence of the mass killings. He tells the full story of what the Ottoman Turks planned and carried out against their Armenian citizens beginning in 1915.