Minnesota For Cute

--So you live in Minnesota, eh?
--Yep.
--Yep.

Peter Smith lives in Hopkins, Minnesota. He is a weekly contributor to Minnesota Public Radio's Morning Edition with Cathy Wurzer. A Porch Sofa Almanac is the first collection of Smith’s essays for MPR, and you can meet the author himself--Tuesday, October 12, 7:30pm, at Magers & Quinn Bookellers. Details are here.

These are stories that keep close to the ground and reflect on the common experiences of being a Minnesotan: small-town football, stacks of Hudson’s Bay blankets in an antique store, ice fishing, and even those soggy gloves that emerge from melting snowbanks each spring. Following the calendar year, Smith’s reflections are the perfect season-by-season companion for that chair by the fireplace, a bench by the campfire, a seat on the bus or train--or, of course, a porch sofa. A Porch Sofa Almanac is a hilarious, often wry, and always remarkable portrait of everyday life in the Land of 10,000 Lakes that will resonate with Minnesotans from the state’s biggest cities to its smallest towns.

"In his wonderful new book Peter Smith has assembled a year’s worth of short pieces that prove the true power of story lies not in the ability to reveal but to conjure. In Peter’s world we are verbs not nouns, always changing, living, experiencing, and yet like the seasons, bound to come around again. These little gems, or at times more like Pop Rocks, burst forth; we belong."--Kevin Kling