Evolution of the Jackpine Writers' Bloc

It started in the fall of 1993, with a community-ed class offered through the Park Rapids school system. I was the instructor. The class was given the optimistic title, "Getting Published," and it was my intention to get local writers who enrolled in the class to send out query letters and manuscripts to potential publishers, collect rejection slips by the truckload, and finally, at long last, to help these budding writers achieve the goal of getting published.

It was a diverse group of teachers, doctors, retirees, renaissance women, and small business owners. My only credential as their instructor was that I'd been working as a freelance writer for several years and had some success getting published in magazines.

After the first couple of weeks, we decided to break up into small groups for a couple of sessions so the students could critique each other's work. But a few days before the first group was to meet, my family was involved in a horrible car accident. My husband and I were badly injured, and our beautiful baby girl, not quite 16 months old, was killed.

The students were notified that I would not be able to teach the class, and were offered a reimbursement. Each one of them refused the money, asking instead that it be sent to my family as a memorial gift. They also decided to meet for the critique sessions as planned.

As that sad winter progressed, I was cheered by the funny little newsletter sent to me every month by Dr. Carson Gardner, a published poet and student in the class who had become defacto leader of the group. It was a great comfort to me, knowing "the writers' group" was meeting, and writing, and waiting for me to rejoin them. A few more local writers joined. In one of the newsletters, Carson mentioned they were discussing possible names. Someone had suggested "The Jackpine Writers' Bloc." I started attending meetings the following March, just in time to see that the name stuck (by refusing to call the group anything else).

Shortly after moving here several years ago, I wrote an article for an obscure, east-coast literary journal. "Many times in my first months here [in Menahga]," I wrote, "I've been tempted to put an ad in the local paper. It would run alongside those selling turkey manure or soliciting adoptable white babies for couples with 212 area codes. Mine would say: 'Wanted: People who like to read and discuss things over cold mugs of beer or even cocktails.' I imagine that such smart, artistic people must live around here somewhere. They wear wire-rimmed glasses and they're really skinny, so they can hide behind the jack pines to avoid detection."

The members of the Jackpine Writers' Bloc are those people. Okay, so I was misguided in making a correlation between cocktails and intelligent conversation, but I was coming from a New York City mentality, where a couple of drinks makes one instantly witty and smart, at least in one's own eyes. And my kindred spirits are not all rail thin, nor were they hiding behind the jack pines. They were simply living their lives, oblivious to the big-city prejudices about signs of intelligent life in the northern woods, writing their poetry, stories, reminiscences, and confessionals, open to criticism and always supportive of one another in a world that is not very supportive of writers. We're not isolated up here. On the contrary, we're tightly connected. I hope that this literary journal will be a celebration of life in north-central Minnesota, and of the highly intelligent decision to live outside so-called civilization.