About
The nonprofit Jackpine Writers’ Bloc started in northern Minnesota in 1993. We are a writing group as well as a publishing company. Our literary journal, The Talking Stick, has become a state-wide publishing ground for amateur and experienced writers alike. We kick off each year by opening up for submissions to the next book. Our goal in publishing writers is simple – we publish to encourage solid writing that shows promise, creativity and brilliance.
We started where most writers in north country seem to start – hiding behind jack pines with few outlets and few who could enjoy our craft with us. Things have changed. The writers in our group, and those from many other writing groups that have sprung up in nearby cities, offer experience, criticism and encouragement in abundance.
We’ve grown a lot since we started publishing The Talking Stick in 1995 but one thing we have always fought for makes us entirely unique: We’ve never charged a reading fee and never intend to. In 2005 we started publishing individual poets, short story writers, memoirists and novelists. (Our author Mike Lein is a several time MIPA award winner.)
Without your support, there would be no Jackpine Writers’ Bloc and no Talking Stick books. We are a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization, your donation is tax deductible. If you would like to donate you can use our contact form or, if you’re interested in submitting a book for consideration for publication, you can click here.
Board of Directors
Sharon Harris (website) has been writing poetry since she was 15 and has had over 180 poems published in various anthologies and magazines including The Lake Country Journal, Lakes Alive and The Talking Stick. Currently she has five poetry books published, Timeless Tracks (1984), Life Savors (2000), Unspoken (2011), Twice Broken (2019), and her favorite Reverie (2023). She was born and raised near Park Rapids and currently works as an Operations Officer and Assistant Cashier. Sharon has been the driving force and lead editor of all of the books published by the Jackpine Writers’ Bloc since 2002. She serves on the editorial board, handles the annual submissions, organizes the monthly member meetings, prepares the meeting minutes and handles all of the sending out to the mailing list.
Tarah L. Wolff (website) has been the co-editor and designer of all of the books published by the Jackpine Writers’ Bloc since 2003. She’s been at her day job as a secretary for over ten years and has designed hundreds of websites along the way (including this one) as well as hosting websites and print, digital and graphic design. She self published her first book in the spring of 2012 Embraced by Darkness and has had several poems and short stories published over the years. Growing up she always dreamed of being a professional writer but would never have guessed that the little blog she started in 2014 would fulfill that for her. With over 70 thousand followers Grandma’s House DIY keeps her busy writing every day.
Niomi Rohn Phillips retired as assistant dean of the Graduate School at the University of North Dakota in 2000. In the past decade her work has been published in periodicals: Generations, Among Women, Lakes Alive and Lake Country Journal. She has written travel and garden features for the Enterprise, the national publication, Greenprints, and AARP online. She has published work in an anthology, Winter a Season on the Prairie and in literary journals: Whistling Shade, The Talking Stick and Dust and Fire. Her work has won awards from Northwoods Arts Council, the Brainerd Writers Alliance, and The Talking Stick and she has two books published, Growing Up Catholic and The Writer and the Engineer.
Mike Lein (website) is known across north country for his many published stories of cabin life with dogs, boats, relatives, friends, and other assorted shady characters. He’s been widely published in regional and national outdoor magazines, won several Midwest Publisher’s Association awards and has six books published. Firewood Happens, Down at the Dock, The Crooked Lake Chronicles, Cabin Fever, Hunting Around and The Last Cabin. He’s been a part of the JWB for many years, serving on the editorial board and often attending the monthly writers’ meetings.
Marlys Guimaraes is a retired RN who has been published in the Talking Stick, the Moccasin, Writer’s Digest Poetry Collection, and in various local publications. She publishes in multiple genres. Her poems are etched into the sidewalks of Riverside Park in Mankato, MN as part of the Word Walk competition. Her love of the written word had its beginnings as a child when her father read poetry to the family as part of everyday life. She loves how the rhythm and texture of words can relay profound thoughts, ideas, and emotions in small spaces. Her writing life started as a teenager when she had a weekly column in her local newspaper. She was accepted into the year-long mentorship program with award-winning writer, Candace Simar, is a member of Jackpine Writers’ Bloc and has served as a Midwest Book Award judge. She’s been featured on the Minnesota Public Radio program, Common Ground.
Evolution of the Jackpine Writers’ Bloc
By Linda Henry, 1999
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.
Linda Henry is an essayist, storyteller, and occasional poet. She has written hundreds of articles for national magazines, including Reader’s Digest, Parenting, Travel & Leisure, and Glamour, as well as regional and trade publications, websites, and newspapers. She was a co-founder of The Talking Stick, and was editor in chief of its first 8 volumes (1992?1999). From 1999 through 2001, she contributed a column to Lake Country Journal, “Of Woodstoves and Websites,” about her life as a single mother in northern Minnesota. A full-time freelance writer and editor for eleven years, she is now editorial manager for Children’s Home Society & Family Services. In her personal writing life, she has many works in progress.