Stonich takes interesting new novel on northern MN tour

Minnesota author Sarah Stonich kicks off a tour of the state’s great northern environs this Monday for her new book “Vacationland.” The tour puts her in most of the libraries of the Arrowhead Library System.

May 13: Duluth, 6 p.m., main library
May 14: Hibbing, noon; Buhl, 3 p.m.; Aurora 6 p.m.
May 15: Gilbert, 10:30 a.m.; Babbitt, 1pm; Hoyt Lakes, 6 p.m.
May 16: Hibbing, noon; Mountain Iron, 2:30; Coleraine, 6 p.m.
May 17: Cloquet, noon
May 20: Grand Marias 3pm; Silver Bay 6pm
May 21: Ely 3 p.m. (plus a reading at Piragis that evening)
May 22: Cook, noon: Baudette, 6pm

I did many of these libraries for Overburden and they are fine venues for readings and conversations between authors and readers. I did not do them all in 9 days, though, or attempt a Cook to Baudette double header.

Stonich is a past honoree of the Dylan Days, where I am co-chair and literary coordinator. Her recent memoir “Shelter” was last year’s winner of the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award.

Publisher’s description of Vacationland:

On a lake in northernmost Minnesota, you might find Naledi Lodge—only two cabins still standing, its pathways now trodden mostly by memories. And there you might meet Meg, or the ghost of the girl she was, growing up under her grandfather’s care in a world apart and a lifetime ago. Now an artist, Meg paints images “reflected across the mirrors of memory and water,” much as the linked stories of Vacationland cast shimmering spells across distance and time.

Those whose paths have crossed at Naledi inhabit Vacationland: a man from nearby Hatchet Inlet who knew Meg back when, a Sarajevo refugee sponsored by two parishes who can’t afford “their own refugee,” aged sisters traveling to fulfill a fateful pact once made at the resort, a philandering ad man, a lonely Ojibwe stonemason, and a haiku-spouting girl rescued from a bog.

Sarah Stonich, whose work has been described as “unexpected and moving” by the Chicago Tribune and “a well-paced feast” by the Los Angeles Times, weaves these tales of love and loss, heartbreak and redemption into a rich novel of interconnected and disjointed lives. Vacationland is a moving portrait of a place—at once timeless and of the moment, composed of conflicting dreams and shared experience—and of the woman bound to it by legacy and sometimes longing, but not necessarily by choice.