Moving Words hosts diverse author panel
Author Will McGrath (center) tells a joke regarding his book while authors Daniel Bernstrom (left) and Antonia Angress (right) respond humorously. All three authors discussed their most recent books as part of the Moving Words series of author events.
Daniel Bernstrom, who describes himself as an accidental picture book writer, holds “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak open for the audience. While not his book, he uses it to describe the messages that picture books can convey while not being obvious.
Author Will McGrath (center) tells a joke regarding his book while authors Daniel Bernstrom (left) and Antonia Angress (right) respond humorously. All three authors discussed their most recent books as part of the Moving Words series of author events.
Daniel Bernstrom, who describes himself as an accidental picture book writer, holds “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak open for the audience. While not his book, he uses it to describe the messages that picture books can convey while not being obvious.
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NEW ULM -- Attendees at the New Ulm Public Library got to hear the perspectives of three unique award-winning authors at the Moving Words author event Friday.
The event, which travels to libraries across Minnesota, gives audiences the chance to listen and learn from up-and-coming authors who have won Minnesota Book Awards. This is the first time the event has stopped in New Ulm, after several years of trying by the public library.
Antonia Angress, Will McGrath, and Daniel Bernstrom made up the three-author panel who spoke to attendees about their work. Angress is a fiction novelist who writes for adults. Her first work, "Sirens & Muses", was a Minnesota Book Award Finalist and named a Best Book of 2022 by Glamour Magazine. As it turns out, this book had been brewing for a while.
"It took me about six to seven years to write," Angress said. "By the time I finished was very tired. It’s an adult literary novel following poor, striving, struggling visual artists. First at an Art College and later in New York. It’s a campus novel and a coming-of-age story about love, creativity, ambition, figuring out who you are, and what is important to you in life."
Angress then read the first chapter, which focused on an art student struggling with being away from home. She channels her emotions into her art and is then shy and unsure of herself when she has to show it to her classmates and teacher the next day.
Will McGrath is currently a non-fiction writer, with his most recent book "Farewell Transmission" being a collection of both writings beforehand and writings specifically for this collection. McGrath said the stories differ from one another, but they follow a common theme.
"A lot of the people in the book are living hidden lives in different kinds of ways," he said. "I spent a couple years working in the world of homelessness. There are some stories in the book from people I know from that world. There’s a story in here about a guy who was wrongfully imprisoned for 30 years and eventually exonerated. His life was kind of hidden away differently. There’s a story in here about in the modern day in Minneapolis, an urban goat herder. A guy who spends his day herding goats around doing a park restoration. I’m always interested in people doing interesting and weird things on the margins of society and doing what I can to kind of share these stories."
He shared an essay from his book featuring his two children Sam and Eve, when they were four and two years old respectively. The story, entitled "Hallucination Donut Shop", features McGrath as he brings his two kids to a donut shop in Maine. As he talks to the older waitress and she remarks how children don't stay that way forever, McGrath reflects on his feelings concerning his children getting older.
Daniel Bernstrom calls himself an accidental picture book writer. He is also a full-time English instructor at Minnesota West Community and Technical College. He fully intended to be a novelist, but an encounter with an advisor put him on a different path.
"I wanted to write such beautiful prose and it wasn’t working," Bernstrom said. "I was in graduate school, I got assigned to an advisor named Jacqueline [who was a] picture book writer. I started working on my prose and she said 'Have you tried picture books?' I said 'Oh, I mean, okay.' Very interesting. I mean, who likes picture books? That’s why I’m an accidental picture book writer."
Bernstrom shared his children's book, "Good Night, Little Man", concerning a child who has lost his sheep plush and won't go to sleep without it. As the father loses his patience with the child, the background color becomes more inflamed until the child throws a tantrum and the color is bright red. Bergstrom used this as an example of background story-telling, conveying emotions and ideas without spelling them out.
All three authors were available afterward for questions and had books available for purchase. The next stop on the trail for the Moving Words series will be in Fairbault at the Buckham Memorial Library Thursday, November 2. John Lee Clark, Nicole Kronzer, and Jess Lourey will be the authors there.