Loren Niemi

Friends, When I sat down to pen this year’s Solstice missive, I found myself wandering through many memories of summer’s past and for reasons that are not exactly clear to me I got stuck on the summer of 1971. What follows is the story I wrote about that summer (with some added notes to provide a little context). I was 24 when I went to my first summer camp in northern Wisconsin. “Camp Blue Knob” (in reality Camp Birch Knoll) could just as easily be called “Camp Bitch N

These are unsettled times in the third month of the year. That feels like an understatement even though the facts on the ground, support it. Here in Minneapolis, January was marked by ICE - occupation, mass protest, and neighborhood organized resistance in sub-zero weather. February whiplashed between a notorious Minnesota “False Spring” and winter’s stubborn refusal to leave. March began without a traditional Hockey or Basketball Tournament blizzard but then it showed up l

Here it is Christmas Day and I am finally getting to the Winter Solstice missive. It’s late but perhaps just as well as I have had time to consider and reconsider what I want to say. To that end, this rumination is in two sections: one personal and if you are a reader of these annual texts, expected, and the other more philosophically grounded in the role and nature of storytelling in these times. Two weeks ago, Jeni Smith was at the American School of Storytelling preppin

In June of 1985, three men armed with a snare drum, a baritone horn, and a pocket full of play money stood on Nicollet Mall and played a...