Customer Reviews

Down From Basswood

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I loved this book! It's a beautifully written series of stories that definitely have the ring of truth. More importantly, these stories gave me a better understanding of the people of the northern Minnesota area, and what it was like to live a life here.

Every once in a while you read a book that touches you deeply, informs your ideas about the world, makes you more sensitive and thoughtful, and becomes part of the fundamental lens through which you look at the world. Down From Basswood is exactly this type of book. You can't shake this book - it becomes a second skin.

Well written book and worth reading.

Misleading cover page. This is not just short stories.
These are the stories of individuals and these peoples lives connect.

Down from Basswood presents 27 authentic human tales from the Northern Minnesota lake district involving native Americans, Finnish immigrants, and other pioneers. Laitala is a master at telling gripping life-stories.

"The stories in Lynn Maria Laitala's Down from Basswood spring forth from a profound understanding of the Finnish immigrant and the Native American and the values and experiences they share in the northern regions of Minnesota. She cuts to the depth of her characters' souls, offers truths, and serves the reader up intense, yet delightfully human, insights".
- Börje Vähämäki, Editor, Journal of Finnish Studies

" Every culture has its storytellers. Among those are a few who have the ear, the background, and the ability to absorb the particular dialogue of that culture, and even rarer, the skill to transfer that dialogue to paper for others to read. Such an author is Lynn Maria Laitala, who has chronicled the fascinating lives of those incredibly rugged north country folk among whom she was raised and whom she brings to life with sparkling insight, love and humor. It is a book all northlanders should read -- indeed must read. And it is a book that makes a fine gift to outsiders who might wish to better understand the unique mix of immigrant and Native American which forged the culture of the northern frontier". - Bob Cary, Editor, Ely Echo

DOWN FROM BASSWOOD AUTHOR PRESERVES NORTH WOODS STORIES

Lynn Laitala, an award winning author and historian from Bennett, Wisconsin, was recently interviewed in the Duluth News Tribune, about her remarkable historical fiction short story collection, Down from Basswood, published by Aspasia Books. Lynn Laitala is well known to North American Finnish audiences as the former editor of the Finnish American Reporter and the New World Finn, and for her many published short stories. Down from Basswood is a masterly rendition of the Finnish American experience in northern Minnesota.

The following is an abridged version of the interview published in the Duluth News Tribune, on March 17, 2002.

History:

"My father worked for Central Co-operative Wholesale in Superior when I was born. Our family home was in Winton, just north of Ely. I spent my first six years between Winton and Superior. Then my father got a job in Minneapolis, and I moved back and forth between the different worlds of the friendly north and the not-so-friendly city.

"I attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. I left with a Masters degree in history and returned to Ely, where I worked for the Minnesota Historical Society doing oral interviews. That was my re-education into the history of the north. The stories people told me did not fit easily into the historical theories I had learned in college. Also, they usually told the best stories when the tape recorder was shut off. I started to write fiction in an effort to preserve a glimpse of the world in border country as it was for Finnish immigrants, Indians and their descendants."

Your most recent publication:

"`Down from Basswood,' published by Aspasia Books, is historical fiction set in Minnesota's border lakes area. Twenty-four narrators tell interrelated stories, together telling a history from about 1900 to 1978. While almost all of the characters are fictional, most of the events actually happened to somebody. I mixed stories that I heard when I was growing up with stories that I heard when I was collecting oral histories. I did some archival research as well."

Awards:

One of the stories from Down from Basswood, "Child of the Place," won first prize for short fiction in the 1999 Lake Superior Writers' Contest. Laitala's non-fiction essay "What I Learned from the Old Immigrants" was a winner of the Lake Superior Writers' Contest 2001 prose category. "People always like to read a good short story."

Author you most admire:

"I greatly admire Canadian writers Margaret Laurence and Alice Munro. They have shown me how the stories of individuals create a history of a community." It is probably natural that Laitala feels an affinity to Canadian writers. She explains, "The U.S.-Canadian border divided the traditional territory of the Ojibwe. The area that is now northern Minnesota shares a history with Canada, from the fur trade that began in the 17th century on through the waves of immigration beginning in the 19th century. When I traveled back and forth from northern Minnesota to the Twin Cities as a child, I was moving between radically different cultures. Traveling north to Fort Frances or Port Arthur and Fort William ( Thunder Bay), I was moving within a world I understood. The publisher of Down from Basswood is Canadian.

Your sources of inspiration:

"People who are gone. I would like them to be remembered, both for their own sake and because I think they have important things to teach us. The traditional values of cooperation, hospitality, humor and a high regard for practical skills sustained people through generations of hard times.

"Neither the peasants who came from Europe nor the inhabitants who were already here believed that progress would make life easy. Life is always hard. The challenge of life is to try to maintain character and humanity in spite of life's inevitable hardships and tragedy, or in spite of affluence, for that matter. Life will always make opportunities for that challenge.

"The idea that maintaining character and humanity should be the proper goals of life is the legacy the old people left me. It is both a blessing and a curse. The old people still weigh in on all my choices."

A writer's responsibility:

" Writers should be suspicious of stereotypes and easy characterizations. Words committed to print can have power for a long time. Books written long ago that depict inhabitants of the north as savage, stupid or crude are still on the shelves of libraries all over the world. It's easy for writers to render people as caricatures but when anyone's humanity is diminished it diminishes the humanity of us all."

Your muse:

"I come from a storytelling tradition. Even as an event transpired, people would be thinking about how they would tell about it afterward. A good story couldn't be told too many times. Listeners would lean forward expectantly at the right points, no matter how many times they had heard the story before. In my childhood, a major pastime was visiting and telling each other stories."

Words you live by:

"`There's enough room if we all get along.' It's an old folk saying.

Ths story is truer than the non-fiction histories one finds. The Finnish immigrants and the Native American Indians of this part of Northern Minnesota are presented in an unforgettable way. A lovely book, a gem. Something to own, so you can reread it, which you will want to do.