It’s a good week for reading as cold clamps down on us. From Minnesota writers today we’ve got creative nonfiction about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness blowdown and fiction about ghosts and wallpaper as well as old men who have a drinking community. Stay warm.

“Not Quite a Ghost”: by Anne Ursu (Walden Pond Press, $19.99)

(Courtesy of Walden Pond Press)

“…Violet curled up in a ball in her bed. She did not know what to think. She could feel the empty spaces where her dad was supposed to be, where her friends were supposed to be. The first, she’d carried with her for so long that she learned to live with it; she was the girl with that empty space, that’s all. The second, though, was new, and it hurt, and it made the first one hurt too. Really, there were so many empty spaces now.” — from “Not Quite a Ghost”

Life is filled with changes for Violet Hart, who’s beginning middle school in award-winning Anne Ursu’s new middle-grade novel, which blends her signature scary vibe with real-life sickness.

Violet has been happy living in a little house with her mom, stepdad, big sister Mia and little brother Owen. But now her parents have purchased a big old house on Katydid Street. When Violet moves into her third-floor attic bedroom, she’s struck by the ugly wallpaper with vines and flowers all twisted together. Then she gets sick, so exhausted she can’t stand, but doctors can’t find anything wrong with her. A few doctors believe she just wants attention and is faking her physical pain. Then, to her amazement and confusion, one of her two best friends turns on her, her big sister doesn’t want anything to do with her, and she feels alone and helpless when she sees something behind her wallpaper.

“Not Quite a Ghost,” which was starred by The Horn Book, is a ghost story, blended into a sympathetic look at real pain as well as the difficult transition from elementary to middle school and the inevitable changes growing up brings.

Ursu’s fiction always explores paranormal themes, including her most recent, “The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy,” as well as “The Real Boy,” a National Book Award nominee, and The Cronus Chronicles, a trilogy based on the Greek gods. “Spilling Clarence” won a Minnesota Book Award. She has been a professor in Hamline University’s MFA in writing for children and earlier in her career she did theater reviews for local publications, including the Pioneer Press.

In her author’s note, Ursu explains that this story was inspired by Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which a woman is kept in bed and driven mad by a hallucination when she has nothing to do but stare at ugly wallpaper. “For Violet, as you know, there really was something in the wallpaper,” Ursu writes, “and because of her illness, she’s trapped with it. Violet has a postviral syndrome that, if it lasts, would eventually qualify as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” It’s a condition Ursu has been afflicted with since she was in college and Violet’s experiences with skeptical doctors is based on Ursu’s medical challenges. But she assures readers there are good doctors out there who can help.

“Como Flats”: by Mike Dougherty (Palmetto Publishing, paperback $12-$15)

(Palmetto Publishing.)

Once out, among his cadre of drinking buddies, Lonnie was his usual self. He shared his old stories. He told his favorite Irwin Corey jokes and talked at length of the gruesomeness of Ed Gein. He talked Twins baseball to Nick the Brooklyn beer man, who was all ears, having just come from hawking at another Twins drubbing. — from “Como Flats”

Lawyer Dougherty, who has lived in St. Paul’s South Como area for 34 years, makes his fiction debut with a gentle and heartfelt story of Lonnie Klipsen. who’s retired and spends most evenings at neighborhood bars, regaling friends with old stories he tells so well they don’t mind hearing them again. He’s surrounded by a colorful cast of characters, including his room mate Stan, who does the cooking and cleaning. There’s Max, who travels the world working to eliminate unexploded bullets and mines in war zones. Kraley often slips in through the patio door and sleeps off his night of drinking on Lonnie and Stan’s floor. Then there’s beautiful Laurie, who gives Lonnie lots of attention, which he loves. Most of all there is Sidney, who was a young girl when Lonnie fell in love with her years earlier. Now she’s living on the Iron Range and Lonnie has reconnected with the love of his life through the internet.

Lonnie and his friends are a small population we rarely read about. They are not down-and-out drunks. Several have been professionals; Lonnie himself worked for the federal bank. But there are few women in their lives and the bars surrounding the Como Flats neighborhood are their community living rooms.

Things are going OK until Stan dies and Lonnie goes into a decline until his friends have him hospitalized. Then those friends help Lonnie and Sidney meet at a hotel … and the rest is left to the reader’s imagination.

Dougherty clearly loves these characters, who he treats with respect no matter their drinking habits. It’s a story about friendship and longtime love, not alcoholism. These are lonely men who are alcoholics almost by accident in their need for a community.

“Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters”: by Cary Griffith (University of Minnesota Press, $25.95)

(University of Minnesota Press)

When storms blow up in wilderness, terrible accidents sometimes happen. — from “Gunflint Falling”

Those who read Cary Griffith’s “Gunflint Falling” will not only experience a historic storm in far northern Minnesota as seen through the eyes of those who lived through it, they will also be reading creative nonfiction at its best.

Griffith, winner of a Minnesota Book Award, tells the story of the July 4, 1999, confluence of weather events that resulted in the most damaging blowdown of thousands of trees, some very old, in the region’s history. The aftermath left downed trees that would play a part in the 2007 Ham Lake fire that raged through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Superior National Forest and into the Canadian Quetico, about which Griffith wrote in his previous book “Gunflint Burning.”

“Gunflint Falling” could have been a dry recounting of this event so cataclysmic old-timers in the BWCA said over and over they had never seen anything like it. Instead, Griffith interviewed many who lived through it, building his story through the memories of campers, medevac pilots, resort owners and, most of all, men and women of the Forest Service who are the heroes of this story.

Cary Griffith

Griffith hooks us from the beginning as he tells who his interviewees are and where they were on July 3, anticipating a relaxing holiday. We are with them as they launch their canoes in the good weather predicted by meteorologists. Tension increases as the author goes back and forth between the unsuspecting campers and the first indications from the National Weather Service that something was going wrong. Eventually, those who could see to the west noticed the dark clouds forming, which all agreed were a disturbing greenish color.

When the storm hit rapidly, everyone on the water or in camps could only take cover as the howling winds snapped off trees and branches flew everywhere.  As giant trees fell, blocking portages and falling on tents and food supplies, two women in separate parties were badly injured and needed help. When the storm abated and some canoeists made their way out of the area, they promised to contact the Forest Service authorities to send help for the victims. One of the most gripping parts of this story is how one woman in pain was kept as comfortable as possible while two of her companions canoed out to get help.

The fierce storm came on so suddenly that the Forest Service had no way to prepare. Thanks to the agents’ skill and experience, they set up command posts quickly and were able to send personnel into the BWCA by land and water as soon as the weather moderated.

The second part of the book is about search and recovery by the Forest Service, which called in its most experienced managers. Their first priority was finding campers and assessing injuries after the storm that left 500,000 acres of blown-down trees. That was no easy task, since there was no way to track how many people were in the vast BWCA on this holiday. Those entering the wilderness had to check in, but only one person in a party had to sign for everyone. Cellphone coverage was spotty at best, and the Forest Service relied on radio communication. They agreed it is amazing no one was killed.

Lyndsay Berglund of Berglund Construction moves brush from the front of the Gunflint Lodge on the Gunflint Trail on Tuesday, July 6, 1999. (Josh Biggs / Duluth News Tribune via Associated Press)

Those unfamiliar with the BWCA and cities on its border will be grateful for maps in the book that show which parts of the vas area were affected and the routes taken by the campers we follow in the book.

Griffith, who’s also written three crime novels featuring U.S. Fish & Wildlife special agent Sam Rivers and his cadaver dogs, will launch “Gunflint Falling”  at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 30, at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., in conversation with Kurt Johnson, co-author of the Minnesota Book Award-winning novel “The Barrens.”  Free. Registration is encouraged at magersandquinn.com/event/Cary-J.-Griffith-presents-Gunflint-Fallilng-270. He will also read at 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 8, at Next Chapter Booksellers, 38 S. Snelling Ave., St. Paul, in conversation with Chris Knopf, executive director of Friends of the Boundary Waters. For more information go to nextchapterbooksellers.com/event/2024-02-08.

Related Articles

Literary calendar for week of Jan. 21 including veterinarian Jody Lulich and his memoir, ‘In the Company of Grace’

‘Grandmothering While Black’ takes a deep dive into how parents’ parents are coping with raising the next generation

In a panic? Woman gets real about anxiety attacks and ‘mid-mom crisis’ in new book

Literary pick for week of Jan. 14

Literary calendar for week of Jan. 14: Anne Ursu debuts her new novel at Red Balloon