• Publishing essays on writing in six Teachers & Writers anthologies—The Alphabet of Trees, Sing the Sun Up, Frederick Douglass, Old Faithful, Educating the Imagination, and Walt Whitman
  • Receiving a travel grant to Germany and Italy from the Jerome Foundation which funded the experiences in my mother-daughter travel memoir looking-for-a-publisher, Falling for Botticelli.
  • Being interviewed by Fred Wasser for NPR’s Sunday Edition to discuss Turning the Feather Around: My Life in Art, my oral history memoir of Minnesota’s premier Native American artist George Morrison. Morrison was accorded one of two solo exhibits at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C
  • Writing two collaborative plays with the Women’s Theater Project: Sign of a Child, and Red Light/Green Light. The latter was made into a television production which won an award from the Television Guild.
  • Reading my poetry at the Poetry Center in New York with other winners of the Bordighera poetry prize, judged by W.S. DiPiero
  • Tracking down and interviewing many originating members of The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in preparation for writing Up to the Plate. Visits to the ballparks where they played in South Bend, Kenosha, Peoria.
  • Studying poetry and memoir writing with outstanding poets and prose writers, notably Patricia Hampl, Vivian Gornick, Eavan Boland, Richard Hoffman, and members of the Writer’s Hotel team.
  • One of the founding members of The Laurel Poetry Collective, a ten-year initiative, which resulted in many anthologies, and my individual book of poetry Between the Houses with images by Delor Erickson. Reading to packed houses and selling Laurel publications beyond our wildest expectations
  • Presenting at an AWP panel, 2008, about my second book with Teachers & Writers, The Circuit Writer, following a first such presentation at AWP/New York for the first book, The Story in History.
  • Interviewing shoemakers, potato farmers, clay diggers, pottery workers, river dwellers—as well as working with children to write their own poems about these communities, and ultimately creating readers’ theater productions from both interviews and student writing. The theater productions featured local readers and musicians.
  • Traveling, traveling, traveling—for years throughout Minnesota and the Dakotas doing writers-in-the-schools residencies, staying in newer and older (colder) motels, surviving blizzards, and proving again and again the depth and delight of children’s creativity
  • Spending summer weeks on Lake Superior’s North Shore, with northern lights, deer, mice, birds of lake, shore, woods, and fulilling solitude and writing. Ditto residencies at many literary retreats at Ragdale outside Chicago, The Dorset Colony in Vermont mountains, and the Anderson Center near the Mississippi.
  • Teaching aspiring writers, historians, literary critics, educators at Twin Cities institutions of higher learning, including Hamline University, the University of Minnesota, and Metropolitan State University
  • Publishing over 30 articles on the visual arts
  • Publishing a fine-arts chapbook of poems based on anonymous family photos, bought in a Sioux Falls flea market. The Country’s Way with Rain.
  • Publishing individual poems and groups of poems in over 80 journals, including Poetry East, Great River Review, Turtle Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Sing Heavenly Muse, the St. Paul Almanac, Spoon River Poetry Review, the Louisville Review, Milkweed Chronicle, Loonfeather, Italian Americana, Water*Stone, the Minnesota Daily, Poets Portfolio, the WARM Journal, the Lake Street Review, Minnesota Monthly, Mr. Cogito.
  • Publishing poetry and memoir prose in a medley of wonderful anthologies: Woman Poet: The Midwest, The Selby-Lake Bus. Looking for Home, The Poet Dreaming in the Artist’s House, The House on Via Gombito, To Sing Along the Way, County Lines, The St Paul Almanac, The Wind Blows, The Ice Breaks: Poems of Loss and Renewal.