Art by Demont Peekaso Pinder
Survive These Evil Fates
By Valerie Castile ● 2019
Children are a gift from God, a small, innocent replica of ourselves. Our job as parents is to love, nurture, protect, and teach, to bring forth the great qualities of…
Art by Ta-coumba Aiken
William Taylor, First Fiddler of Minnesota
By John Heine ● 2019
Who led a band in the Minnesota Territory known as “the favorite of the dancing public”? A Saint Paul resident, barber, and Black man by the name of William Taylor.…
Arts Roots in Saint Paul: The Seventies!
By Peg Guilfoyle, Molly LaBerge Taylor ● 2019
We remember it as a time of great energy and excitement in the city, when it seemed that anything could be accomplished, and everyone was ready to pitch in. It…
Art by Peter Kramer
My Time as an Irvine Park Resident
By Patricia Kester ● 2019
My family once lived in Irvine Park, a community that was developed in the mid-nineteenth century by some of Saint Paul’s most influential families. It was an era of horse-drawn…
Memories of a Boy Becoming a Man
By Robert Tilsen, Noah Tilsen ● 2019
as interviewed by Noah Tilsen I was born in January 1925. My father and mother, Edward and Esther Tilsen, thought it would be too difficult to get a doctor in…
I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
By Deborah Cooper ● 2019
AT ELEVEN YEARS OLD, my dad, Jack, came to a bitterly cold Saint Paul. His stepfather had been appointed pastor of St. James AME Church, on the corner of Dale…
More Champagne?
By Will Tinkham ● 2019
Her orphanage sat innocently in the middle of Washington Street, just above the Upper Landing docks of the Mississippi, with the Bucket of Blood Saloon at one end of the…
The Bazooka Bubble Gum Fraud
By Louis DiSanto ● 2019
When I turned ten in April of 1958, I thought I was pretty wise to the ways of the world, especially when it came to adults, girls, trading marbles and…
Baseball on Griggs Street
By Gloria Burgess Levin ● 2019
Griggs Street runs south to north through several Saint Paul neighborhoods. But in the Como Park area, it is only one block long. During the late 1950s, this was a…
Evelyn, Aging
By Christina Joyce ● 2017
AUNT EVELYN AND I HEAD TO CALVARY CEMETERY, as we do every June, to place flowers on Uncle Jerry’s grave. Along Front Street in Saint Paul, this Catholic cemetery is…
Art by Patricia Olson
Where I Belong
By Joan Maeda Trygg ● 2017
SAINT PAUL IS MY HOME. I am made of the water and air of this place. I am accustomed to the short urban horizon, to the slant of sun that…
Art by Lisa-Marie Greenly
Young Sins
By Beth L. Voigt ● 2015
“Mom, what’s a sin?” Mom straightened the newspapers on the coffee table, picked up my brother’s two sweat socks and his blue Highland Groveland baseball shirt, and moved the armchair…