Gray Wolf press and Rain Taxi are co-sponsoring the book launch of Skirmish, poems by Dobby Gibson, this Friday, Jan. 9, 7 p.m., at Open Book, 1011 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis. The author will hand out original “fortunes” as well as read from the book, followed by a festive reception. More info is available at http://www.raintaxi.com/readings. The MOQ review of Skirmish follows.

At the beginning of the Great Depression, my grandfather, Louis F. Parker, and a couple of partners founded Builders Engineering Co. in St. Paul, a manufacturers’ representative to the building trades. They survived the 1930s and operated for many decades after that. I have had in a file folder for some years now a facsimile of this letter sent out in December 1932 by the fledgling company to its business associates. We reprinted it in MOQ last December and its message and tone seems even more apropos this year, so I’m sharing it here, along with our best wishes for 2009. —Sharon Parker

Our Riverside Shakespeare, with its embossed wine-red cover and 2,000-some pages, has been a substantial fixture in my husband’s book collection since before we met. My 18-year-old son, on the other hand, recently downloaded the complete works of the bard to his iPod Touch, a sleek little device that fits in the palm of his hand and also holds myriad songs, movies, an algebraic calculator, and access, via the Internet, to the whole world. Is it the beginning of the end for books as we have known them? Perhaps, if you think of books primarily as collections of information. But I can’t help but wonder if the old Druids might have felt that the monastic scribes spelled the beginning of the end of the oral tradition.

The serene tree-and-moon image that graces the cover of the new issue of MOQ was painted by Minneapolis artist Megan Moore, who grew up in the winter-deprived South. She moved to Minnesota just over six years ago to join the man she has since married. Moore studied illustration at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia. You can see more of Moore’s artwork on her Web site, www.meganmoore.com, and by visiting Studiopolis, the studio she shares with other artists in the Northrup King Building (studio 423), on the first Thursday evening of each month.

If you’d like a peaceful break from the economic and political tornadoes raging around us, you could spend a few moments inside the chapel at Lakewood Cemetery in the heart of Southwest Minneapolis, where Hennepin Avenue meets West 36th Street. Upon entering, the first thing you notice is the quiet calm -- the noise of the city fades away, and even your own footsteps are muffled by the carpet runner down the center of the aisle. Next comes awe -- at the intricate mosaics, the soothing symmetry, and the elegant lines of the Arts and Crafts décor. The interior of this modestly scaled chapel is considered to be the premier example of Byzantine mosaic art in the country.

Richard Hagen remembers playing around the neglected Stevens House as a child. “The house sat by the bridge, it was boarded up. When I was a kid, we would play at Minnehaha Park. We would peek in the windows and yell ghost!” • • • Many years later, after retiring from a career with the Air Force that took him all over Europe, Hagen still had a fondness for the historic residence of John H. Stevens, dubbed the birthplace of Minneapolis for its pivotal role as a gathering spot for early city planners. The house has since been restored and moved to a picturesque glade in Minnehaha Park. Hagen served for 20 years on the Stevens House board of directors and volunteered on Sundays to show people around the second-floor rooms.

An impressive five-foot granite monument at Pioneer’s and Soldier’s Cemetery in South Minneapolis marks the final resting spot of members of Minneapolis’s Hayward family. The patriarch, William W. Hayward, was a respected lawyer and real estate developer, but the more famous member of the family was the younger son, Harry T. Hayward, who died on December 11, 1895, at the end of a rope for plotting the notorious murder of the hapless Catherine “Kitty” Ging. The Hayward grave is just one of the spots on the Murder and Mayhem tour of the cemetery scheduled for this Saturday, Oct. 11.

Reviewed by Craig Cox
Plenty of nostalgic genealogy buffs set out to locate their dusty origins, but how many spend a year in their forebear’s homeland, witness the birth of their first child, and eat a whole lot of weird fish in the bargain? That’s just part of the story this fourth-generation Norwegian-Minnesotan spins in this fascinating memoir/travelogue. Dregni, a local writer, musician (Vinnie and the Stardusters), and assistant professor of English at St. Paul’s Concordia University, takes us on a sometimes rollicking, sometimes tragicomic tour of modern Norway, where the welfare system rules, the language vexes, and the food challenges even the most determined cook. On the subject of lutefisk, for example, Dregni receives this advice from one of the Trondheim natives: “First you dry the cod for months; then you put it in lut -- do you know lut? You can use it to take the paint off of wood. It is what you use to clean out your sink when it is stuck. . . . When you are ready to cook it, you soak the fish in water. There should be no yellow left; otherwise, it has too much lut left and doesn’t taste so good.”

By Craig Cox
I’m pretty sure that I first ran into David Carr sometime in 1986, when we were both guests on Brian Lambert’s cable-access TV show. We were talking about some political difficulties St. Paul Mayor George Latimer may or may not have been facing at the time, and I recall being pretty impressed by how much street-level intelligence Carr displayed. He was not shy about dishing the dirt on players I didn’t even know existed. I was the editor of City Pages at the time and Carr was, I believe, a staff writer for the Twin Cities Reader, our nemesis. The Reader is long gone now, the victim of a 1997 acquisition by Village Voice Media, which turned the local alternative media scene on its head. At least, that’s how I remember it.

We are pleased to feature the art of St. Paul artist Emily Hoisington on the cover of the fall issue of MOQ (pictured at left). Hoisington earned her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) in May, and is currently an adjunct faculty member there and at the College of Visual Art (CVA) in St. Paul. She is participating in a faculty show at MCAD through September 24, and will have a piece in an exhibition of artists’ books curated by Jeff Rathermel at Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, September 21 through October 19. She has been accepted into the Emerging Printmaker’s Residency at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, and will exhibit her work there in February. To see more of Hoisington’s art, visit her Web site.