August 2007

Dear Colleagues and Friends of the Good Thunder Series:

The truth is it’s not much of a city. When I moved in two years ago, all I knew about it was from a Chamber of Commerce brochure I got free at the courthouse:  WELCOME, it said, TO THE BIG CITY IN THE LITTLE VALLEY BY THE LAKE. I had six suitcases in the back of my car and $350 and a good reason for leaving the place I’d left. For a woman like me, that’s all people need to know. You start explaining things too much, you start giving heartfelt reasons for this and for that, and then nothing becomes clear and people don’t trust you and you start looking at your life from bad angles. I like things clear. But the truth is it’s not much of a city, not much of a valley, and you have to drive five miles to get to the lake. These are simple facts.

—from Wind, a story collection by Leigh Allison Wilson

Despite the tendency to underestimate the number of good things around us, most of us would prefer to live here than in the city Leigh Wilson writes about. After all, we have milder weather than much of the rest of the country, we have our summer festivals, and we have year-long cultural offerings that keep us engaged in the life of this place and in the lives of places beyond it.

Twenty-six years ago, MSU writer-in-residence Kathy Callaway and her colleagues in English launched a series of talks and readings by contemporary writers that engaged us in just such a way. The series reached out to the campus population as well as to everyone in the broader community who shared an interest in listening to writers discuss and perform their work. Those first eight guests led the way for the 250 who have come since. The Good Thunder Series that began long ago with an idea and a shoestring budget now enjoys a firm position in Minnesota’s literary landscape—solid enough to be cited by the Minnesota Humanities Commission as “the premier small-town reading series in the country.”

The schedule for 2007-2008 is varied and rich. Thirteen writers will join us, including an MSU graduate student and spring winner of the Robert Wright Award, three MSU faculty writers, as well as poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers from Minnesota and beyond. We enter the 26th season committed, as strongly as ever, to featuring a broad variety of emerging and established artists. They meet with local writers, they are interviewed on KMSU-FM, they conduct discussions on the writing craft, and they perform their published work. In doing all these things, they make contact with audiences in immediate and significant ways. As a group, they make palpable the great diversity and vitality of contemporary writing.

The series will receive support this year from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and a small array of MSU sources. The bad news is that the series we present is, because of funding shortfalls, only 60% of what we first envisioned. These are simple facts. As always, we rely on you to help make up the shortfall that still remains, and we trust you to come through, because you always have. When you become a subscriber to Minnesota’s oldest literary arts series, you make it clear:  The truth is it’s very much of a city, it’s very much of a valley, and you don’t have to drive 80 miles to find someone interesting to listen to.

Sincerely,

Richard Robbins, Director
Good Thunder Reading Series

This year's Good Thunder Reading Series is funded by the Minnesota State University Department of English, the College of Arts and Humanities, the Office of Institutional Diversity, the Eddice B. Barber Visiting Writer Endowment, the Robert C. Wright Endowment, and individual donors. This activity is made possible in part by a grant provided by the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council from funds appropriated by the Minnesota State Legislature and the McKnight Foundation. This activity is also made possible in part by a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. MSU Library Services and Barnes & Noble Bookstore at Minnesota State offer additional support.