Mpr News With Kerri Miller

Immigration is a hot topic this election year, and many Minnesota communities are asking questions about how to face the challenges and opportunities immigrants bring. That’s why MPR News host Kerri Miller traveled to Worthington for the final Rural Voice town hall of the 2024 season. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, Nobles County, where Worthington is located, is Minnesota’s most rapidly diversifying county. In 2020, the county’s population was 43 percent people of color, up from two-thirds white in 2010. Much of that diversity comes from immigrants who move to southwest Minnesota for job opportunities. And while there have been setbacks, Worthington has worked hard to incorporate the new residents into their community. Rural Voice in Worthington What have Worthington residents learned? How can other rural communities ensure everyone thrives as immigrants put down roots? That was the topic of lively discussion at the R

It was a celebration at St. Paul’s Fitzgerald Theater Tuesday night, as the 25th season of Talking Volumes launched with Haitian-born writer Edwidge Danticat.She joined host Kerri Miller on stage to talk about the vulnerability inherent in her new book of essays, “We’re Alone.” They also talked about the challenges facing the Haitian-American community at this moment and how Danticat’s own family — who moved to American when she was 12 — faced the immigrant journey. Speaking of the violent threats facing the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, Danticat said: “It reminds me of a collective fragility, right? One of the things that is very precarious for immigrants, especially new arrived immigrants, is this idea that we don’t always get to decide where we call home. … And it can go generations, where you think, ‘Oh I thought I was home, but this person who has more power thinks this is not my home, and they have the mechanisms to disavow me of that notion.’”There was plenty of laughter

Farming is a bedrock industry in Minnesota. While the number of farms has been falling for decades, partly due to consolidation and partly due to crop shifts, Minnesota remains sixth in the nation when it comes to agriculture production.Could rural Minnesota communities also lead the way when it comes to conservation farming? MPR News host Kerri Miller brought that topic to Buck Mills Brewery in Detroit Lakes on Monday, Sept. 9, for a Rural Voice town hall discussion. Farmers, biologists, agriculture leaders and community members gathered to talk about what’s already being done and what potential remains. Rural Voice in Detroit Lakes They discussed everything from how to cultivate a mindset shift in farmers to how to incentivize regenerative practices. They also addressed how consumers around the state can play a role in helping Minnesota farms be good stewards of the land. This is the third Rural Voice town hall of the 2024 season. Past discussions

William Moyers was one of the lucky ones. Sober for decades after years of addiction to alcohol and crack cocaine, he became a model of success and redemption. He started working at the Hazelden Betty Ford, and in 2006, he published a vulnerable memoir, “Broken,” about his journey out of addiction. But then he was prescribed pain killers after some dental work. And he found himself addicted again. Only this time, he had a public persona. People looked to him for hope. And he found opioids a much harder substance to break free from. What happened next is captured in his new memoir, “Broken Open: What Painkillers Taught Me about Life and Recovery.” Moyers said it changed his focus from sobriety to recovery, and it caused him to rethink how addicts can get there. This week, he joins host Kerri Miller in the studio for an conversation about what true recovery looks like. “It’s really messy,” he says. “It’s particularly messy for those of us who are public advocates for organizations like Hazelden Betty Ford who a

How do we restore trust in civic institutions and nurture a renewed sense of possibility in a shared future? That was the central question animating the Rural Voice community discussion MPR News host Kerri Miller led at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing on Thursday. She was joined by political scientist and Minnesota native Brian Klaas, who set the stage by describing the bleak realities of the political landscape in America right now. People feel disempowered and divided. Trust in institutions is low. Democracy feels fragile. But the citizens of Red Wing believe there is hope. They shared stories from their own community of how real problems have been solved, despite political differences. They talked through some of the obstacles, like how to be more inclusive and how to deal with the constant drumbeat of negativity in online spaces. And Klaas gave examples of how citizen assemblies — a relatively new process to this country — can break through the partisan grid

The 25th season of Talking Volumes launches later this month. To celebrate, we thought we’d bring you one of our favorite conversations from last year.The 2023 season finale of Talking Volumes brought author and columnist Margaret Renkl to Minnesota hours after the first snow carpeted our Northern landscape.She declared it “magical” — a theme familiar to those who’ve read her New York Times columns or her newest book, “The Comfort of Crows.”In it, the self-described backyard naturalist details what she saw in her Tennessee half-acre backyard over the course of 52 weeks. She laughs at the bumblebees and fusses over foxes. She laments the absence of birds and butterflies that used to be proliferate. But she also refuses to give in to despair.For those of us paying attention, she told MPR News host Kerri Miller, it would be “easy for the grief to take over.”“But what a waste it would be if we did that,” she added. “If it’s true, that we’re going to lose all the songbirds — at least the migratory ones — how much

The third season of Rural Voice kicked off at the Minnesota State Fair on Monday, Aug. 26. It was a steamy day, but it didn’t discourage rural change makers who gathered at the MPR booth for a lively and hopeful town hall with moderator Kerri Miller. The question before them: How is rural Minnesota changing, and how are rural communities thriving in the midst of it? Rural Voice at the Minnesota State Fair Participants included Northland Foundation CEO Tony Sertich, who emphasized that rural communities no longer need “jobs, jobs, jobs” but “workers, workers, workers.” Teresa Kittredge from 100 Rural Women talked about the importance of mentorship in rural communities, especially when it comes to leadership paths for women. Ben Winchester, a rural sociologist at the University of Minnesota, discussed the implications of a “brain gain” in rural areas, instead of a “brain drain.” Senator Rob Kupec, DFL-Moorhead, stressed the

Jo Hamya’s new novel, “The Hypocrite,” opens as the trap is being laid. Sophia, a 20-something playwright, has invited her father, a famous and provocative British novelist, to come see her new work. As the play begins, he is shocked to realize he recognizes the set. It’s a replica of the kitchen in his vacation home near Sicily. Then the lead actor saunters onstage wearing the author’s favorite shirt and proceeds to have loud sex with a woman he just picked up at a bar. The audience roars. The author is undone. At the same moment, Sophia is having lunch with her mother at a nearby cafe and fretting over what her father will think of the play. Her mother, the writer’s ex-wife, is both sympathetic and cavalier, weary of dealing with self-absorbed artists and yet unable to abandon her martyrdom. Who is the hypocrite here? All of them. Hamya’s novel is a bracing, complex and uncompromising look at the generation conflicts in our present age. She joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold

The first sentence of Frank Bruni’s new book says it all. It reads, “Let me tell you how I’ve been wronged.”More and more Americans are living mired in resentment, says Bruni, convinced that they are losing because someone else is winning. And it’s poison to our collective culture.In his new book, “The Age of Grievance,” he writes: “[Grievance] turns everything — beer, M&M’s, Skittles, restaurant chains, theme parks, athletic teams, athletic competitions — into cultural battlefields. For many Americans, the war zone is infinite.”This week, Bruni joins host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas, as part of our Democracy in America series, to discuss how we got here and how we move forward. In the age of toxic social media and divided national politics, can we learn to inoculate ourselves and our communities against grievance? Guest: Frank Bruni is a longtime correspondent and opinion columnist for The New York Times. In 2021, he started teaching at Duke University’s school of public policy. His new book

When A.J. Jacobs decided to immerse himself in early Americana, he didn’t think about the fact that the required wool stockings wouldn’t have elastic. “They would fall down to my ankles,” he laughs. “I had to put on little sock belts every morning. I’ll never get back that time.”But no matter. He was committed to getting into the headspace of the Founding Fathers, because he wanted to better understand the reasoning and the intentionality of America’s foundational documentThe result is his new book, “The Year of Living Constitutionally.” It’s part performative art — “I went method,” he says — and part intellectual adventure. While writing with a quill pen, lighting his house with beeswax candles and wearing a tricorn, Jacobs researched and talked to dozens of scholars about how to best interpret the Constitution.“We see it as etched in stone,” he tells host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “But it was really deeply fluid. If we recapture that mindset, maybe we will be more flexible in our

Debut novelist Sarai Johnson created four generations of Black mothers and daughters to tackle the questions that came up in her own life: What does forgiveness look like? Can cycles of trauma be broken? Can a daughter truly leave her mother’s mistakes in the past? “Grown Women” expertly probes for answers via the lives of Evelyn, Charlotte, Corinna and Camille. Resentment lingers like a cancer, even as each generation of women struggles to not repeat mistakes that wound. Is it possible for them to find a modicum of forgiveness? Or will the cycles of neglect, half-lies and emotional distance repeat? This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Johnson joins host Kerri Miller for a vulnerable conversation about mothers and daughters and trying your best, even when your best isn’t enough.

Claire Messud has long wanted to write a novel inspired by her family’s history in Algeria, thanks to a handwritten memoir, more than 1,500 pages long, penned by her paternal grandfather. It was rich with stories and history and photos about her ancestors, who were born in French Algeria but then expelled from their homes in 1962 when Algeria won its independence.Her new novel, “This Strange Eventful History,” was inspired by that personal past. It sprawls across generations, geography and time, moving from 1940 to 2010, and across multiple points of view.In fact, MPR News host Kerri Miller says the way Messud plays with time is one of the vital threads of the book — and Messud admits time is almost a character in the novel. “The past informs the present,” she says. “People’s dreams and hopes for the future inform the present, and in a funny way, the ghosts of the past — the people who are no longer there but whose voices swirl around in our head — make sure the past is always with us.”Join Miller and Messud

New York Times bestselling author Nicola Yoon’s new novel, “One of our Kind,” is one of the most talked about books of the summer. On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Yoon joins MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about what led her to write a book about finding the sinister in a Shangri-La. When does our natural bent to protect and enjoy become destructive? What is the true meaning of community?

Lily Chen is not endowed with good fortune — despite the fact that her scientist mother managed to grow a backyard of four-leaf clovers. She doesn’t win raffles or lotteries. She scrapes out a meager living as an unpaid intern with the hopes that it might give her a shot at an entry-level gig.In short: Not lucky.But then a chance encounter upends her life and changes her idea of what fortune really is.Rachel Khong’s new book, “Real Americans,” is already a New York Times bestseller and one of the hottest novels of the summer. She joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about teasing out the truth between luck and choice, soul mates and chance.

The Civil War is remembered for its sweeping battles: Gettysburg, Atlanta, Antietam. Less known are the small troops of men, enlisted by both sides, to fight far from the battlefields. These ruthless soldiers relied on stealth to sneak behind enemy lines — often wearing their opponent’s uniform — and destroyed supply lines, assassinated military officials and gathered critical information. Today, we know this kind of warfare as shadow ops — which is a specialty of military historian Patrick K. O’Donnell. A roadside marker he happened to see in rural Virginia ignited years of research into the Civil War era special forces who were tasked by President Lincoln to undertake spy operations and secrete missions against Confederate units. This week, he joined MPR News host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold ideas to talk about his new book, “The Unvanquished,” which masterfully tells the story of this forgotten chapter of history.

Taiyon Coleman has been writing since she was a child. At age 8, she announced to her family that a novel was in the works. Today, she’s a published author and a professor of literature at St. Catherine University. But the road from there to here wasn’t as straight-forward as you might think. Coleman joins host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk about what happened in the in-between. Some of it is detailed in her new collection of personal essays, “Traveling without Moving: Essays from a Black Woman Trying to Survive in America.” But the deeper story is held in Coleman’s body, in her voice, in her strength. Don’t miss this vulnerable and moving conversation about mothers and ancestors, writing and truth-telling and the power of being a teacher. Guest: Taiyon J. Coleman is a poet, a author and a literature professor at St. Paul’s St. Catherine University. Her new book is “Traveling without Moving.” Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcast

America is steeped in the notion of rugged individualism. It’s comforting to think success is based on our own hard work and self determination.But social scientist Robert Mark Rank says random chance governs far more of our lives that most of us want to admit. This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Rank joins MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about his new book, “The Random Factor.” He shares how luck and chance play a crucial role in shaping history, the natural world and our everyday lives.

Noor Khan is still reeling from the disintegration of her family when she stumbles across a library cart stacked with books in her new small-town high school. In her heart, she just wants to finish her senior year and get back to Chicago as quickly as possible. But when she learns the books are being removed by a group of parents trying to ban literature they deem as obscene, she is enraged. Will her values force her to act, even if doing so puts a target on her back? Or is the fight not worth the cost? That’s the premise of Samira Ahmed’s new YA novel, “This Book Won’t Burn.” No stranger to book bans herself, Ahmed joins host Kerri Miller this week on Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about the freedom to read and how teenagers today are finding the courage to act against a national movement to ban books.

Dystopian novels aren’t known for being hopeful.But that’s exactly what Leif Enger brings to the genre with his new book, “I Cheerfully Refuse.” The beloved Minnesota author joined MPR News host Kerri Miller at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing on June 4 for a special “on the road” version of Talking Volumes. Their conversation revolved around books: the unpredictable journey of writing them, the sometimes haphazard way of finding them, the way a good book leaves a mark that cannot be erased. As Enger’s protagonist Rainy says, “I banged and barged through dozens and hundreds of books. Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking.” Talking Volumes with Leif Enger They also touched on how to maintain hope when the world around you feels like it’s going up in flames. “I Cheerfully Refuse” is set in the “near future” when climate change, wealth concentration and religious zealots who are proudly illiterate flourish

What do you imagine your death will look like? It’s not a morbid or depressing question to Alua Arthur. She’s a death doula, and she firmly believes that giving thought to that question is the key to living a meaningful life. Arthur herself thinks about dying a lot. As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, she has detailed plans for what she’d like her deathbed to be like. But more importantly, she says living with an awareness of mortality helps her live with intention.“Every day that I live is a day that I can get closer to the life that I actually want,” she says. Arthur’s new book, “Briefly Perfectly Human” is both memoir and a surprisingly joyful treatise on why facing mortality is the key to living well. Don’t miss this wise, tender and inspiring conversation. Guest: Alua Arthur is a recovering attorney and the founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. Her new book is “Briefly Perfectly Human.” Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ide