Opinion

The artists have applied! Our 2023 Community Artist-in-Residence call is now closed, and the Advisory Board convened this week to start the process of choosing our finalists for this year’s residency. Thanks to the Blandin Foundation grant, we’re this time able to invite those artists to Granite Falls and try it before they buy it (and vice versa), reality TV style: as part of the application process, three artists will soon visit to complete two-day mini-residencies on this year’s theme, which is “Flora, Fauna and Fungi.” After that, one artist will be offered the six-month residency.

You know how sometimes you think you’re going to do just a quick, little project and then it turns into something that consumes your entire day? That happens to me a lot in my house. So on Sunday morning, when I realized I had no photo sessions scheduled for the first Sunday in many months, and no events to cover for the newspaper or last minute interviews scheduled for the weekend, I decided I could get a couple of small projects done around the house that were desperately needed.

In case you’re wondering why I was not in church Sunday morning, I was in the Omaha airport at 6:30 a.m. waiting for a flight back to New York, listening to an announcement that unattended baggage would be confiscated, eating a breakfast croissant and blueberry yogurt, drinking coffee, which came to $19.74, which happens to be the year I started doing my old radio show.

I think most of us have come to the point in winter where we don’t maybe pay as much attention to the forecast, kind of expecting winter to be done with its wrath by now. At least, I know that’s how I’ve been functioning.

“One of the neat things about Granite Falls,” I said to a poet from Chicago last Saturday evening, “is how great our small community is at celebrating the arts.” We Minnesotans are not known for our bragging abilities, but I couldn’t help it: at our writing-conference dinner party, we’d been talking about how places that are, say, covered in vibrant murals tend to be healthier places, and why that might be. I was proud to have a shining example on hand.

There have been some remarkable people in rural Minnesota over many years, but none are more interesting or may have impacted more lives than the late Dr. Kathleen Jordan. A bright and spirited woman with a can-do attitude, she was responsible for the testing of thousands of youngsters for the dreaded disease of tuberculosis in our part of Minnesota.