Author Mark Munger (Cloquet River Press)

As the newest member of the Greater Mesabi Men’s Book Club (GMMBC), I was charged with providing the book, treats, and beverages for this month’s meeting at Dr. Rich Dinter’s home outside of Hibbing, MN. Given I’m of Slovenian ancestry (one-quarter) and given my first novel, The Legacy, was about Tito and Yugoslavian Partisan resistance to Fascists during WW II, and given I’m attempting to work on another historical novel set in post-WW II Slovenia, I scoured the Internet for a novel that might be of interest to my fellow book club members. Necropolis is the book I settled on.

I’ll admit to making a slight mistake in selecting the book. GMMBC reads exclusively novels, which, on many websites, Necropolis is considered to be. However. In reading the book and checking other sources, it turns out the book is more correctly denoted as “autobiographical fiction”, i.e., memoir. So right out of the gate, I violated the intentions of the club I’d just joined. Ugh.

Anyway, the members were kind and, to a reader, appreciated Pahor’s effort to illuminate an aspect of the Holocaust that gets little attention: the plight of non-Jews who opposed Fascism and found themselves in various Nazi-run concentration camps in Europe. Pahor, who was Slovenian but born and raised in Trieste, which became part of Italy after WW I (remember, Italy spent that war on the side of the Allies; territory including Trieste was Italy’s reward for opposing Austria), was drafted into the Italian army in 1940 and served in Africa. After the Allies cleared the Axis from north Africa, Pahor returned to Trieste and joined the Slovenian Partisans, a group opposing not only the Italians and Germans but Tito’s communist Partisans as well. That stand, one voiced in his writings, got the man into hot water and ended with him being sent to Natzweiler Concentration Camp in France. Given his language skills, Pahor ended up working as a camp medic and that’s where his journey to hell begins.

Pahor’s prose is lyrical and, as one of my book club members pointed out, reminiscent of Ulysses  in it’s non-chaptered, stream of consciousness style. In describing the heroism of a young athlete who attempted escape by improvisational pole vaulting over an electric fence, only to be recaptured and executed, the author writes:

A quarter of a century had passed between that “damn you” and the moment when the young Russian spat at an SS commandment here, but the essential qualities of the players had not changed. Slavic pride, Germanic ruthlessness. Indeed, except for love, which indisputably holds first place, high-minded resistance to injustice is the most we can contribute to the salvation of human dignity.

The Russian did not escape Germanic ruthlessness but the image Pahor paints with words is timeless. My only criticism of the book is that, in attempting to ramble through the horrors of Nazi evil in a very personal re-telling of his experiences, coupling history to revisiting the camp (wherein he describes present-day tourists viewing sites he lived through in pain, agony, and dismay), the author leads the reader on a somewhat confusing journey. The retelling is very non-linear and takes some getting used to.

That said, in the end, this is a classic story of the Holocaust, retold by one who survived.

4 and 1/2 stars. The book prompted much in-depth examination by members of my book club.

Peace

Mark

I picked up this book at a local arts and crafts fair here in Duluth. I’ve met and chatted with the author, a professor at a local college, on a number of occasions and, having enjoyed his poetry (insert the author’s name in the search bar on this site to see other reviews) so I thought I’d give his prose a try.

Boelhower uses the faith traditions of the world’s major religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Confucianism, and Hinduism) to craft a model for both joint (institutional) and individual decision making in a modern world. To do so, he culls five key wisdom principles common to our major faiths to create operating principles and judgmental criteria to assist readers in coming to wise and clearly-thought decisions. The five tenets cited (and used) by the author in crafting his model include:

1. Respect for all persons;
2. Appreciation of the wholeness of being human;
3. Recognizing the interconnectedness of all reality;
4. Valuing inner wisdom and personal experience;
5. Attending to preservation and transformation.

The book often times seems directed more to institutional and corporate collaborative thinking than individual problem solving, which is my main criticism of the work. However, Boelhower’s organization and elucidation of his salient points does transfer from group institutional decision making to family, personal, and smaller group transformation through careful discussion, planning, and implementation. 

All in all, I came away with, I think, a more thoughtful and kind approach to working with others, both in my family and in my greater world.

4 stars out of 5

Peace

Mark

I rarely read genre fiction but when assigned this book after my very recent acceptance into a local men’s bookclub, I plunged in eyes wide open. I was hoping, given that Ms. Coel chooses to write Arapaho-inspired crime fiction due to an encounter with the late, great master of Native American detective/police stories, Tony Hillerman, I might learn a bit and also be entertained as I had been by Hillerman’s Joe Leaphorn books. I wasn’t. Here’s why.

As described by the book club member giving us a mini-tutorial on Coel’s life and writing career, the author is a historian by trade who, after listening to Hillerman at a gathering of writers, turned her love of the Arapaho people in Colorado into a series of novels. That background was interesting but what struck me most is that Coel considers herself dedicated to character rather than plot, a departure for most genre specific authors. Generally, writers of mystery tales, detective stories, or police procedurals are driven by a crime and the resulting plot and only briefly touch upon character. So I was surprised to hear that this writer views herself more interested in studying and illuminating the folks who populate her stories. That may be her ambition, her intent, but that’s not how this book played out.

There are two stories here. The first, a present-day murder that takes place on the reservation, leads to speculation by the protagonists, lawyer Vicky Holden and Catholic priest Father John O’Malley that Robert Walking Bear’s death wasn’t an accidental drowning but a murder related to the second story: the legend of a fortune buried in the Colorado hills where infamous hoodlum Butch Cassidy buried loot back near the turn of the 19th century. It’s the historical fiction contained in the Cassidy sections that’s tightly drawn, spurred my interest, and kept me engaged in the book. One of the main issues with the story is that Vicky, a local attorney, is a poor choice to be the foil for the obligatory evil surrounding Walking Bear’s death. She is not a DA, not a criminal defense lawyer, not someone who would naturally be tossed into the mysterious death of a local. She’s a civil attorney and seemingly, as the plot plods along, really doesn’t do all that much in terms of solving the crime other than placing herself smack dab in the killer’s clutches. I disagree with the author: she is not a writer of complex, deep, interesting characters, at least not here. Here, she is the creator of a formulaic genre crime story populated by paper dolls.

Unlike Hillerman, who delved deeply into the culture of the Navaho to explain and detail his plots and characters, Coel doesn’t do a great job of giving the reader insight into Arapahoe culture as it relates to her fictional story. In the end, I agree with a couple of my other book club buddies: this is a beach read, though even in that context, I’ve read better.

Too coincidental and ordinary to compel me to read others in the series and that’s too bad because I do so love Hillerman. Not horribly written but not something that makes a reader go “wow.”

2 and 1/2 stars out of 5

Peace

Mark

Here’s the thing. I’m not going to quibble too much about the author, a trained trial lawyer like me, setting up a death penalty case in Mississippi circa mid-1970s without an alternate (or two) on the jury. Maybe he inserted that detail and I missed it while listening to this novel via Audible while walking the track and working out at the local “Y”. Maybe not. There were a couple other instances (like the fact that the District Attorney’s second-in-command, a witness to a fatal bombing, sitting as co-counsel at the bomber’s murder trial) that didn’t ring true. But it’s fiction, right? So I’ll give the dean of trial thrillers a pass. 

But what I won’t give the author a pass for is the lack of any real suspense, surprise, or tension within this long saga of the Delta underworld. Oh, I was interested in Jesse, the protagonist DA’s battle to bring sanity, values, and peace to his birthplace by taking on the Dixie Mafia. I also was intrigued to an extent  and by some of the antagonists and other supporting characters. But after spending much time setting up the characters for the anticipated twists and turns inherent in Grisham’s best work (e.g., The Firm) once good and evil squared off, other than one unfortunate death (no spoiler here!), this tome plods to a very dull, unsatisfactory conclusion. 

The narration is typical for this author and is acceptable genre prose. The dialogue, read by the narrator, is fine. But what this story lacks is heart: a deep-seated, emotional bond created between the book’s fictional characters and the reader. Readable (or listenable) for certain but nowhere near the best of this author’s legal thrillers or those of others in this category. I recently re-watched the movie version of TheVerdict, a faithful rendition of Barry Reed’s classic courtroom drama. That story and The Firm, both on the page and on film, are what we who write legal fiction should strive for. Sadly, this effort falls short of reaching such a such lofty perch on the library shelf.

3 stars out of 5. Not sure if book clubs want to tackle this one or not.

Peace

Mark

From this month’s Finnish American Reporter: writer Mark Munger interviews Finnish-Canadian filmmaker Kelly Saxberg.

MM: I’m assuming, given all the work you’ve done to preserve Finnish Canadian history in your documentaries, that you’re of Finnish descent.

KS: My Finnish heritage is on my father’s side. My great-grandfather, Kustaa Saxberg, immigrated at the end of the 19th century to Fort William. He first started working at Silver Mountain as a miner. Then he met his wife Ida, who was from Himanka and they lived out at the mine site and she was a midwife. When they moved into Fort William (now Thunder Bay) my great-grandmother would host Finnish women from rural communities and helped birth hundreds of children. She was the main midwife for the east end of Fort William, which was home to many immigrants in those days. My great-grandfather, because of his mining experience, helped build the water tunnels from Mount Mackay to Fort William. My grandfather was the youngest child of eight. I made a film about his oldest brother, Alfred Saxberg, who was a veteran of the first World War.

MM: Can you fill the readers about you, about Thunder Bay, and what it means to be a person of Finnish heritage in Thunder Bay in the 21st century?

KS: I was born in Cornwall, Ontario, but my parents moved back to Thunder Bay when I was just a baby so my mother could finish her nursing degree. Then we moved to Brandon and later to Winnipeg, but my family never missed a summer out at Lake Shebandowan, where my grandfather Jack Allen built a log cabin in 1928. When I started in the film industry, my first company was Shebandowan Films now shortened to Shebafilms. Somehow fate brought us back to Thunder Bay in 1996 when my husband Ron Harpelle got a job at Lakehead University teaching history. I had been working in the film industry but since there were no jobs for me in Thunder Bay, I decided to try making my own films. Not long after our success with a few, Ron joined the filmmaking and later, when our children grew up, they too joined the family business. One of the first films I made was “Letters from Karelia” about Finns from North America who were recruited to build a socialist utopia in Stalin’s Karelia. I then made the film “Under The Red Star,” which tells kind of a prequel and is the story of the Finnish Labour Temple.

MM: As a non-Finn, I loved the neighborhood surrounding Hoito and the old Finnish Labour Temple. Tell a bit about the building’s history and the effect of its loss.

KS: My husband and I started Friends of the Finnish Labour Temple as a charity when we were both on the board of the Finlandia Association of Thunder Bay. As the treasurer, I knew how fragile the state of finances were; however, by careful sales of some parking lots, the Kivela Bakery, fundraising, and, new management of the Hoito and its renovation we were able to get everything back in the black. Sadly, a group of people with other agendas were voted in and they had other plans. Within a few years, almost every organization that had helped raise funds for the hall were no longer welcome. Bad management finally led to bankruptcy and the building sold to an outsider who gutted the hall to build condos. A fire started accidentally that winter and it destroyed 110 years of Finnish and labor history in a few hours. Miraculously, the owner was able to demolish the entire building two months later and get every permission to build condos in a building five times the size of the original historic landmark. They claim that they will rebuild the façade, but it just won’t be the same. The owner was the same person who gutted the inside and sent hundreds of historic artifacts to the landfill. 

On a positive note Friends of the Finnish Labour Temple is more active than ever. We continue to collaborate with the Finnish community. We have organized two Finn Festivals Canada events and three virtual Juhannus festivals.

MM: One thing I loved about sitting in Hoito was listening to the Finnish voices around me. Do you speak and/or write Finnish?

KS: the first thing I did when I moved to Thunder Bay was to sign up for Finnish language course at the University of Lakehead. I did really well, and now that I have been back-and-forth to Finland and working on several films in Finnish, I have a pretty good ear for the language, but I will never be fluent. I do feel however, a strong connection to my roots and I’m very proud of the countless hours of footage captured of events that I documented over more than a dozen years at the Finnish Labour Temple. My hope is that I will create a virtual website that will rebuild a virtual Finnish Labour Temple.

MM: I recently watched your short film, The Hoito Project. Give the readers some insight into the film.

KS: It was the composer for my film Letters From Karelia, Ari Lahdekorpi, who got me involved in the Finnish Labour Temple. He is an amazing jazz musician, and he was very active in the Finnish community, and had just been elected to the Finlandia Association, when we proposed our very first film festival to be held in 2005 in Finnish Labour Temple. … I have been involved in literally hundreds of fundraising efforts for the Finnish Labour Temple. I don’t regret any of it and we were able to bring Finnish musicians, filmmakers, artists to Thunder Bay to experience the Hoito and the magic of the Big Finn hall and all its legacy.

MM: Describe your background, training, and desire to make films. Where did that passion originate?

KS: I became a filmmaker because of my dad who was a local DJ here in Thunder Bay in the 1950s and early ‘60s. He was the on-air sports Director at CKX in Brandon then got his teaching degree and got a job teaching broadcasting at Tech Voc high school in Winnipeg. As a 12-year-old I was able to go and play with all of the equipment and make videos. I had a babysitting job when I was 14 which allowed me to buy a film camera and projector. When I was 18, I got a job at the local television station doing studio camera for the nightly news and TV show. Later I did sound for the newsroom and learned how to edit. My boss there, then connected me with Lara Mazur at the National Film Board who hired me as an editor trainee. Eventually I started editing NFB films and when I moved to Thunder Bay I decided I wanted to be a director and cinematographer as well. Because we live in a small, isolated community far from Toronto, I also had to become a producer, grant writer and promoter. We helped build a filmmaking community here with our not-for-profit organization, Flash Frame Film and Video Network.

MM: Talk a bit about Under the Red Star and your work with Ron as a collaborator on your films.

KS: “Under The Red Star” was really Ron’s idea and Michel Beaulieu’s research. We wrote up a proposal quickly to the Ontario Arts Council and a new organization that funded films to build an industry in Northern Ontario gave us a grant that enabled us to shoot on 16 mm film and create an amazing historical docudrama that was supported by almost the entire community. The film is also about politics so the people who are on the right-wing spectrum obviously never supported the film, or went to set foot in the “The Big Finn Hall,” which was built by socialists.

The same divisions between red and white are still alive and well in Thunder Bay. Part of the reason for this is because, the most recent Finnish immigrants were obliged by the Canadian government during the Cold War to pledge that they never had been nor ever would become communist. The halls during the war were closed down, because in fact, Canada was at war with Finland, which was a co-belligerent with Germany, and had invaded our ally, the Soviet union. Amazingly all these politics still tend to play out.

Ron was the producer, production manager, actor and helped write the narration for the film. It was a huge project and meant that we had to gain the trust from the local Finnish community. The working title for the film was “Big Finn Hall.” When we showed the film in Finland people were absolutely amazed by the number of Finnish speaking local actors we were able to feature and hire.

MM: Another of your Finnish-themed documentaries is Letters from Karelia. What prompted your interest in the reverse migration of Finns from Canada back to Karelia?

KS: When I first moved to Thunder Bay, I started researching my Finnish heritage and found the story of Rosvall and Voutilainen, and found a book by Varpu Lindstrom called “Defiant Sisters.” I phoned her up and told her I was interested in telling that story and I would like to meet Taimi Davis, who she had been interviewing and documenting for years. I went to Toronto and Varpu gave me all of her research and was keen to help me make films about Finnish immigrants in Canada. It became a labor of love because we didn’t get any positive response for any of our project ideas so we decided we would just make a film about Taimi. Then the letters arrived from her brother, who had gone to Karelia in the 1930s. We learned his fate and in investigating it, we found out the fate of so many others. The project was not really about making a film. It was about telling the stories of people who had been disappeared and murdered.MM: Most readers will likely be familiar with the somewhat pejorative terms, “church Finns” and “hall Finns.” In Under the Red Star, you explore the more radical elements of Finnish political thought.

KS: Varpu Lindstrom‘s work in Defiant Sisters told the story of radical women, Finnish immigrants like Taimi, her mother and Sanna Kannasto. Their stories and struggles were so incredible to me. I felt I needed to shed light on them, and the contribution they made to our country.

My Finnish family were in fact, quite conservative and leaders in the church; however, my great-grandfather and my grandfather were union men and they knew how to fight for workers’ rights. You don’t inherit your politics, and I would say I was drawn to these stories as a historian, and also as a feminist. Looking over my entire career as a filmmaker, I have to say that the majority of my work focuses on strong women and stories that are seldom heard and rarely celebrated.

MM: How do you select a topic for a film? What goes into writing, filming, editing, and distributing documentary films in Canada?

KS: I have a master’s degree in history and my thesis was “Women in Power Structures in Cuba and Nicaragua.” My husband is a Latin Americanist and we have spent a lot of time travelling and living in Latin America. We are both historians and we are both fascinated with labor history and social history. Most of the films we have made stem from the kind of research that we are doing. We are getting old now, and someday might even retire however, we have trained up a dozen or so young filmmakers and artists in Thunder Bay, who will be able to carry on the tradition that we have started.

MM: I recently interviewed your friend Ava Karvonen. She’s working on a feature film and then, likely, looking towards retirement. What are your future plans in terms of projects and life after filmmaking?

KS: I would love to show any of my films at Finn Fest 2023. I am the current chair for the Finnish Canadian Cultural Federation which organizes Canadian Grand Finn festivals. We have had to go virtual for the past three years, so we are really looking forward to participating in a live Finn Festival once again! Right now, Ron and I are on sabbatical in France where we are trying to complete three films which were delayed due to the pandemic, but are nearly complete. We have funding for three more films which are now starting in production. Another huge project connected with Friends of the Finnish Labour Temple has been the digitization of our local 16mm nightly news footage from 1956 to 1979. We created Reel Memories of the Lakehead on Facebook and streaming on www.ResearchTV.ca and are now working on another series called the View From Up Here.

MM: Kiitos!

The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles (2021. Viking. ISBN 978-0-7352-2235-9)

Love it or sort of like it. No one I’ve talked to who’s read this very long, winding epistle from the road, actually hates it. Readers appear to fall into two distinct camps: those who adore the book and those who can take it or leave it. After spending inordinate time slogging through this lengthy tome, I find myself in the later camp.

Towles begins his story in southern Nebraska, not far from the Kansas state line, in the little farming community of Morgan. In the first chapter, we’re introduced to Emmett Watson, eighteen years old, traveling in the back of  a car driven by the warden of the reformatory where Emmett did time for manslaughter. At the Watson farm, we meet Emmett’s eight year old brother, Billy, a precociously strange child who is, in a word, a savant genius and wise beyond his years. Shortly after the warden deposits Emmett on the family farmstead, we learn two other inmates from the reformatory; the troublemaking yet lovable Duchess and his affable and nondescript (at least to me) sidekick, Woolly; have hidden themselves in the warden’s car trunk to escape their youthful prison. The patriarch of the Watson family is dead, having failed miserably as a farmer, and so the two boys decide to set out in search of their mother who left the dusty plains for San Francisco years before.

What transpires is a convoluted, unexciting, mundane, slow-moving trip, not west, to California, but east to New York City. I quickly became uninterested in the boys’ journey (the two escapees being part of the drive east on the book’s namesake highway), finding little to pique my interest beyond the insertion of Sally, a local gal who may or may not be Emmitt’s love interest, and the mysterious Preacher, a Black tramp the Watson boys befriend after hoping a train (their car having been “borrowed” by Duchess). It’s not that Towles can’t write. He clearly can. But as a storyteller, the principle job of an author dabbling in fiction, I found the boys’ journey, both literary and descriptive, to be unduly tedious. It took three hundred pages into this long, long saga of nuance for me to say, “OK, there’s enough here for me to see it through.” Not what I’d call a sterling endorsement. 

After that, I found myself digging in and enjoying the storyline as all four boys scurried around New York City trying to figure out their collective or separate destinies. But then, in supremely disappointing fashion, as if the writer of this long, meandering road journey ran out of gas, I came to an ending that left me thinking, “What was the fucking point?” Sorry to swear but that’s what I actually said when I closed the cover on this one, folks.

Love it or tolerate it. I didn’t end up hating this book (despite my rant) but the invocation of an eight-year-old genius protagonist began this tale’s long, slow descent into disbelief. From the book’s onset, I couldn’t buy into the character of Billy, one of the four main actors on Towels’s stage. He seems, as I think about the book, a weak attempt by the writer to avoid writing in the guise of a child by cloaking Billy with wisdom, intellect, and insight that, as a dad of four sons, doesn’t ring true no matter how smart the kid is. That strained depiction of character started my questioning of this story, questioning that briefly abated but then became full-blown skepticism when I reached the novel’s uninspired conclusion.

Maybe you will see things differently. Maybe not.

Peace

2 and 1/2 stars out of 5. Book clubs seem to love this novel and I can’t figure out why.

Mark

Having traveled to Venice with friends (at the end of a 12 day Mediterranean cruise) and spent three days taking it all in, I wish I’d read this book before making the trip. While Crowley’s primary emphasis is chronicling-sometimes in agonizingly lush detail that slows the narrative, the military history of an enigmatic republic-he weaves within that storyline enough politics, culture, art, and science to flesh out Venice’s rise and fall as an Adriatic naval power to keep things well-rounded.

Written in a largely crisp and sequential style, the author carefully reconstructs the history of Italy’s most magical and independent city-state from the Crusades to the fall of Constantinople and beyond. Along the way, we are treated to character studies of scoundrels, leaders, admirals, artisans, traitors, and thieves that enrich the overall story arc and strengthen the narrative.

A fine piece of historical writing.

4 stars out of 5

                                                            INTERVIEW WITH JOHN SALMINEN

MARK MUNGER:

Hello, John. Kiitos for doing this interview. I first encountered you as an art teacher at Duluth Denfeld High School.

JS: .  

My interest in teaching dates back to the 1960’s. When I declared myself as an Art Major, I realized that, in the name of practicality, I would need to consider earning a living, and teaching seemed a good insurance policy. I was hired after graduation and discovered I really enjoyed working with kids. I retired after 33 years, and I can honestly say I enjoyed my job right up to my last day. I spent, roughly a decade at each of Duluth’s 3 public high schools, and while each school had superficial differences, the constant factor was the relationship I maintained with the art students. In the twenty-plus years since I last taught, I still derive great pleasure from emails and Facebook contacts with former students and it’s gratifying to know their time in the art room meant a great deal to them, as it did to me.

MM:

How did you come to specialize and become known primarily as a watercolorist?

JS:

In the early 1980’s I was introduced to Cheng Khee Chee. Fellow East art teacher, Mel Kumsha and I took a series of Continuing Education watercolor classes from Chee, and I realized I’d found my medium. Chee is an excellent teacher and I soon found myself focused on learning as much as I could from him and from the larger realm of contemporary watermedia. I had no idea at the time that I would become a significant contributor to modern watercolor medium.

MM:

With a surname of “Salminen”, you obviously have Finnish heritage.

JS:

I’m Finn on my Father’s  side and Dutch on my Mother’s. My dad grew up on a subsistence farm in Florenton MN. His upbringing was difficult and he spoke no English until entering the Virginia, Minnesota public schools. Like many first-generation Americans, he wanted to put his immigrant upbringing behind him and become “American”. He left Northern Minnesota and never looked back.

As a result, my brother and I were not very aware of our cultural ties to Finland. As I began to wonder about my Dad’s growing up and our Finnish heritage, his recollections had begun to fade. Given Finland’s global contributions, its high standard of living and top education system, I’m proud to have a Finnish surname, but my contact is primarily vicarious. 

MM:

I’ve seen your paintings in galleries and online and it seems you love depicting the hustle and bustle of cities.

JS:

As an artist, I’m best known for my urban landscapes. John Salminen, Master of the Urban Landscape (published by Penguin Random House) is an excellent overview of my work. I think my fascination with city scenes comes from the fact that my wife Kathy and I live in a log home situated on one hundred and ten acres of Northern  Minnesota real estate: in the deep woods. To me,  big cities, the vibrant hustle and bustle and visual chaos is exotic and very exciting.

Once I decided I wanted to make my mark as a professional painter, I realized I needed to hone my skills ( practice, practice, practice) and establish credibility within the profession. This occurred in a couple of ways.

First, attaining signature membership in national professional organizations, which is accomplished through acceptance in competitive exhibitions. After my signature on my paintings, I display the initials of two top organizations: AWS ( American Watercolor Society) and NWS ( National Watercolor Society). These are hard-won distinctions and I display them proudly.

Additionally, publication in national magazines enhances one’s artistic credibility. The route to publication includes having work displayed in national exhibitions. These exhibitions are competitive. Over the years the acceptances began to outweigh the rejections, and eventually, publishers noticed. It’s through involvement in highly competitive shows and achieving high-profile awards that my work came to the  attention of the international art community. As a result, I’ve been invited to represent the United States in numerous international forums. This is something I never dared to imagine from the perspective of a public-school teacher.

MM:

You’ve exhibited your work and painted all over the world.

JS:

International travel has been a wonderful perc of being part of the global art community. I’ve just returned from a trip to Scotland. I was invited to teach for a week and also spent several weeks visiting Edinburgh and the remote Northwest coast. I work primarily from photos I take on location, and I’ll be devoting my studio time to painting Scottish scenes for a while.

MM:

You remain active as a mentor to aspiring artists and as a judge in international competitions.

JS:

My career as a teacher has continued uninterrupted since I left the Duluth Public Schools. I now teach week-long workshops throughout the country. My students are adults and are highly motivated to expand their skills and understanding of painting. I find I still love teaching. After twenty years of traveling for workshops, I’m about to slow down and spend more time devoted to my first love … painting! I also judge competitive exhibitions and I find this is a good way to keep in touch with my painting peers. Folks always wonder how you judge artwork, and the answer is simple: pick your favorites. Of course, my definition of “favorites” has been honed over the years and results from the willingness of generations of students to generously share their work with me. Thanks to each and every artist, from high school students to International Masters who have shaped my vision and enabled me to continue to contribute.

Kiitos, John! See more of John’s amazing work at https://johnsalminen.com/home/ . (This interview first appeared in the Finnish American Reporter.)

This ginormous book was, like the experimental novels written by its subject, a bit of a slog. But I made it through Ellmann’s revised biography of the great Irish novelist and man of letters. Eventually. A scholarly tome, the book’s narrative covers 745 pages. Footnotes and endnotes add an additional 200 pages, none of which I investigated, read, or scanned. I couldn’t bear it. I was done in by the minutia of detail the author incorporated into his study of a man, though quintessentially Irish, who left Ireland in his twenties never to return. That I guess was the biggest take-away for me. James Joyce left his father and mother and home island to chase his dream of fame and notoriety as an erudite man of letters, never to return. Not for his mother’s funeral. Not for his father’s illness and death. And not to spread the gospel of A Portrait, Dubliners, Ulysses, or Finnegan’s Wake up and down the coasts and byways of the Emerald Isle.

In addition to being struck by Joyce’s recalcitrance at returning to the place of his birth, Ellmann’s detailed accounting of decades of his subject’s failure to be recognized and published, including years of trying and failing to place Dubliners in the hands of readers both at home and abroad, complicated by years of reluctance by agents, editors, and publishers to chance prosecution for obscenity, struck a chord with this self-published author. To a far lesser extent, I too have tried and failed to attract an agent, editor, or mainstream publisher to work with me: to bring my words to a broader audience. But unlike Joyce, I’ve maintained, for the thirty-odd years I’ve been at the poet’s game, gainful employment so that my family never experienced the poverty and desperation James Joyce foisted upon his mistress/wife and two children. My wife would have never, even on the promise of my work becoming chosen for greatness by the powers-that-be, stood for what Joyce put Nora, Georgio, and Lucia through, including the period when he was finally recognized as a literary genius shortly before his death.

In the end, this book assisted me in understanding the driven nature of Joyce’s obsession to write and be published; marks of character I know intimately. But reading this mammoth work did not bring me closer to understanding that unattainable, virtually unreadable whale of a novel Joyce labored over in his attempt to re-write Homer. I still don’t understand Ulysses and this book did not tempt me to attempt a second read of Joyce’s masterpiece. There are too many other great books to read.

Still, as an in-depth, exhaustive study of a famous scribe, this book is indeed the ultimate repository of all things Joyce.

4 stars out of 5.

Peace

Mark

My novel, Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh was researched and written between 2002 and 2004 as an attempt to highlight, explain, and fictionalize the mystery of Finnish immigrant Olli Kinkkonen’s disappearance.  The question I’m often asked, as a non-Finn writing about Finnish Americana, is “Why?” Here’s the answer.

While working as a District Court (trial level) Judge in my hometown, I was asked to participate in a serial reading of Michael Fedo’s book, The Lynchings in Duluth, at a local bistro. The event was an attempt to raise money for a memorial to the horrific lynching of three Black circus workers accused of raping a white woman in 1920. In reality, the purported crime was a false report by a daughter frightened to tell her father she’d been out “on a date”. But that truth didn’t stop a mob of angry white men from hanging three innocent men.

That backstory is important because, in preparation for the public reading of the Fedo book, I researched the lynchings on a Minnesota Public Radio website. There I found a short rendition of the “other” Duluth lynching; one that took Mr. Kinkkonen’s life. Given I’d grown up with friends of Finnish heritage, given I’d spent many nights in a log cabin my high school friends and I built on an old Finnish farmstead in northern Minnesota, and given I was innately curious as to why the Finns tried to farm such an inhospitable land, I was drawn in by Olli’s story and went to work uncovering what I could about the man, his times, and his death.

I planned to write a fictionalized biography of Mr. Kinkkonen’s life story. But as I dove into the historical record at the Duluth Public Library (a wonderful treasure trove of newspaper clippings, articles, maps, photos and the like) I felt it was not my place to speculate about a real human being. Tell his story, sure. But there is so little known of Olli Kinkkonen beyond articles surrounding his death, a circumstance where he was dragged from his boarding house in Duluth’s “Finn Town”, and disappeared, it simply didn’t “feel” right making him the protagonist of a novel. I should note that, three weeks after his abduction, Olli’s tarred (not feathered) body was found hanging from a birch tree in Lester Park. After a cursory inquiry, the Duluth Police concluded he’d committed suicide. Despondent, they theorized, and embarrassed at being tarred, he’d hanged himself. As a former prosecutor, trial lawyer, and sitting judge, I thought that conclusion convenient and nowhere near the truth.

My skepticism regarding the “official” record made it even more important to me to tell the story, but not further tarnish the man’s memory. And so, Olli became a character in Suomalaiset, but only a minor one, allowing me to still tell his story but to do so in a broader context of immigration, love, the Great War, the Influenza Outbreak of 1918 and the Great Cloquet Fire.

I chose this approach for two reasons. First, as I’ve written, I didn’t think it was my place to invent a life for a victim of tragedy. In addition, there is so little known about Mr. Kinkkonen, meaning most of what I would’ve been included, if he was the central figure in the story, had to be invented. What is known about the man is that he immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s, worked as a logger and laborer, and was an opponent to compulsory military service during WWI, which drew the attention of some folks who abducted and likely murdered him for his “unAmerican views” in September of 1918. That is essentially all the public record includes regarding the man. Far too slender in detail, I determined, to make him the protagonist of a novel. So, in an effort to educate, entertain, and enlighten, I invented Anders Alhomäki, a Finnish “everyman” and friend of Mr. Kinkkonen, to carry the fictional tale.

 In working on the book, I was cognizant that a retired Duluth police officer was also researching Olli’s death with an eye towards writing a non-fiction book. I knew that I had to work diligently and with speed to be “first” in getting Olli’s tale into the hands of the public. I plowed ahead; cognizant I was wading into unfamiliar waters. What if the Finns hate what I’ve written? I mean, it is one thing to follow your high school English  teacher’s adage “write what you know”:  it’s quite another to write about an ethnicity  and a history not your own. Still, Olli’s story needed telling and I was, I hoped, the man who could tell it with grace and dignity.

Since 2004 when the book was published, I’ve received positive feedback from Finnish Americans, Finnish Canadians, and Finns who’ve read not only Suomalaiset, but my sequels to Anders Alhomäki’s story: Sukulaiset: The Kindred, and Kotimaa: Homeland. My willingness to explain Olli Kinkkonen’s murder (and the larger story of Finnish migration) in historical context has brought me to Finnish festivals, allowed me to form valued friendships with folks of Finnish ancestry, taken me to Finland and Estonia, compelled me to write articles for this and other Finnish American newspapers, and is, quite simply, the best decision I ever made as a writer

In late September of 1918, Olli Kinkkonen was buried in Duluth’s Forest Hill Cemetery. For nearly a century, his remains occupied an unmarked, pauper’s grave. In 1993, the  Työmies Society installed a marker at the gravesite to remember the man, his abduction, and his death.

(This essay first appeared in the Finnish American Reporter October 22, 2022 issue.)