[Music] [Music] Welcome to Almanac North.

I'm Brett Scott.

Thank you for joining us tonight.

We're talking with local book sellers about what bookstores mean to the communities they serve.

Plus, a look at the upcoming FinFest celebration.

That's all coming up.

But first, we look at news making headlines across the region this evening.

Minnesota is ramping up efforts to protect families from harmful chemicals and everyday products.

The state's 2025 chemicals of high concern report highlights substances that may cause cancer, disrupt hormones, or harm child development, including lead, mercury, and formaldahhide.

Since 2022, the toxic free kids program has added 15 new chemicals to the list and removed 200 based on updated research.

The program also expanded community outreach, making safety information clearer and culturally relevant.

One recent project with Hamlin University focused on how women of reproductive age understand chemical risk risks rather in personal care products.

For more information, visit the Minnesota Department of Health website.

Well, a major development deal in Duth is off the table.

That's for now.

This week, the Duth Economic Development Authority voted unanimously to cancel its agreement with the Incline Plaza development, citing repeated contract breaches.

The $500 million Incline Village project aimed to transform the old Doo Central High School site into housing and retail, but the financing fell through.

The developer, who says they've already invested $15 million, is now suing their lender and asking the city for more time.

Despite disappointment, DA leaders say they had no choice but to protect taxpayer interests, pulling back on a planned $75 million subsidy.

For now, the 13acre site will remain empty.

There are approximately 650,000 Finnish Americans in the United States.

This includes individuals with Finnish ancestry and those who immigrated from Finland.

Our first guest this week is a Mimu Samala, executive director of FinFest, a celebration of Finnish culture and heritage.

Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me.

You pronounce your name so much better than Oh, it's okay.

Just say it for us.

It is Musama.

Oh, I could I couldn't.

So, FinFest is coming up.

How did it originate and and uh what is what is FinFest?

explain it all.

Yeah.

So, FinFest um is a actually a national organization and an event that has happened already 40 plus years.

So, it's an old traditional event that travels around the country uh for the last uh two years.

It has been held in Duth Minnesota and will be here for five straight years which is the first time FIFA stays in one location.

Other than that, it has traveled everywhere in the country and has celebrated the, you know, the Finnish culture, uh, Finnish America and Finland.

And we're bringing it to Duth again next weekend and, uh, looking forward to really the 150 plus events that, uh, are celebrating all that Finland can be.

As a native of Finland, how important is it to celebrate the heritage and the culture?

Well, when you think about the people you know around here, uh, a lot of them have a connection to Finland.

Maybe they know a Finn, maybe their grandparents came from there.

Everybody knows a proud Finn, you know, and it is for anybody.

It's important to connect to your roots and celebrate.

Additionally, Finland is leading the world in a lot of different areas, whether it's happiness, education, and so on.

Anybody whether you're a Finn or a friend of Finn or just wannabe, you can come to Finnfest and learn all about that.

Culture, learning, music, food, you name it.

I like how you said proud because Finn are very proud.

We are so proud of it.

Yes.

Yes.

So tell us a few of the big keynote areas that we can look forward to.

Yeah.

So FinFest, like I said, is culture and learning.

So the learning side of things.

um when you participate in the actual festival with um with the presentations and so on uh we are bringing the current ambassador uh Lena Kaisa Mikola uh to Duth who used to be the ambassador uh to China.

So that's uh that kind of a highlevel dignitaries and speakers that we're bringing to talk about Finland's role in the world whether it's uh in leadership, innovation, uh sustainability or the diplomatic skills that Finland has historically had.

What's Finland's role in today's world and what is it in the future?

Wow.

You mentioned even housing is a topic of Yeah.

And soility.

Yeah.

So there there is a lot of um obviously climate change is one of the topics uh Finn are known for.

Uh for example there will be a speaker uh an architect from Finland Marco Hutunin who will be speaking about how uh you can learn from indigenous cultures and bringing it into modern architecture.

So it is a vast so many topics that we are bringing to this FinFest from highle conversations to tasting Finnish foods.

There is so much to enjoy and tell us how we can check out the whole schedule of events.

So if you go to finfest us our website actually has under event details a schedule that uh you can find the 150 plus events there from music and so on uh to these uh conversations.

You know the this year the Tori Nordic fair to mean marketplace uh will be open to the public and free.

It's has always been open to the public but it's open and free to the public this year and that will provide people an opportunity to go get a glimpse of um piece of FinFest uh where it's the live music, the food and the vendors that are selling the finished goods like the coffee mugs, the Mins.

I was going to say we have 10 seconds left but show us that mug.

Yeah.

So Finn, we are bringing the four mooming five muming characters from Finland who will be performing um at Finnfest and everybody can Google what Mins are, but we're celebrating 80 years of Finnish Muin books and um all other things that you can check online.

All right, like I said, the website is full of everything you need to know.

Oh, yes.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Well, thank you for having me.

I appreciate it.

And we continue this evening with Tina Higgins Wuso of Chester Creek Books.

She's sharing the tale of how her establishment is breathing life into the community, drawing kindered spirits together within its walls.

Hi, my name is Tina Higgins Wusso and I'm the owner of Chester Creek Books.

Chester Creek Books started about 20 years ago.

Mark Highland opened the store.

Uh he lives nearby and he was a retired radiologist and he was a book collector and he managed Oldtown Antiques and he drove by one day and saw that the church was for sale and thought this would be a perfect location to move all of his books over here and make it a bookstore.

So he did.

He built all these bookcases and slowly over 20 years filled it up with thousands and thousands of books.

So I've been working in the used book world uh for most of my adult life.

In my 20s I worked down in St. call for Tom and Kathy Stransky at Midway Bookstore.

Um, and I worked there for several years.

Then I moved to Duth and I met Mark and he asked me if I wanted a job one day and I said sure and I walked in here and I really just couldn't believe how gorgeous it was.

Um, and that was about 15 years ago and I've worked for him alongside him for part-time over those years.

And the only reason that Mark let the score store go at all is because he has macular degeneration.

Um, otherwise he would rather be here than anywhere else.

Maybe except for fishing, he would rather be fishing than anywhere else.

Whenever I travel, I I stop at every used bookstore I can find.

And it's particularly used bookstores that I love.

Um, the history in every book that you hold, wondering who held it first, who got it as a gift, um, what it contains, the knowledge it contains, and just the beauty of books.

Some books just aren't made the way they used to be made.

And so it's gorgeous to hold a leatherbound old copy and just you imagine that someone decided to make this beautiful thing for beauty's sake.

And so what's inside of a book and what's outside of a book matters to me very much.

But this space in particular, because it's in uh a church, it holds so much more magic.

I think when you walk in, you just have this sense of of wonder about it.

And the way that Mark built the cases purposefully, so there's just kind of like little dead ends and little it's a little maze of of bookcases.

Um it feels kind of like a wonderland.

You don't know what you're going to discover next.

And I love that treasure hunt feel of an old used bookstore.

And I think um it's something that I really want to like hold and carry forward so that we don't lose it.

Especially since co to be in the same space as other people is a gift, right?

And to actually hold something and to open it up and read it and then put it back on the shelf and move on to another thing and then make a stack and talk to the person at the counter.

That's a gift that we we won't always have and we haven't always had.

And it's an important thing to not lose that sense of community and that that sense of holding and touching in the world around you and not just to be online.

I think just bring them here.

Just let them see it for themselves.

Um it really is a magical place.

It it's um it's like nothing I've ever seen in all my travels of of bookstores.

And there's some really great bookstores.

I love Schwamagan Books in Washurn, Wisconsin.

That's a great bookstore.

There's Drifless Books in the Monqua area.

That's amazing.

Midway bookstore in St. Paul is amazing.

Um, but there's something really magical about this space.

The way the light comes in because of the stained glass windows and the red carpet and the high ceilings and just the the expansiveness of the space that there are just multiple rooms.

You can just keep going and keep going um is really special and really unique.

And then throughout the store also there's art for sale um from local artists and other places and there's antiques for sale.

There's vintage clothes.

So there's always something more to see.

You know, there's a lot of exchange here.

And a lot of the books come from different places.

And sometimes the books come from a office space where someone has um um you know, they're they're the widow of somebody has to clean up their office and the books come here.

Um and and that can be you know looked on as a a really hard sad thing or we can say you know in our lifetimes we get to gather these things and then we get to leave them to other people and they get to live on.

And so here all of these things are living on from past lives.

Everything in the store is old and someone else has held it and someone else has bought it and loved it and now it's someone else's.

So, one day a woman comes in and and she is um terminally ill and still well enough to to go through her things and she's giving things away to her family and and her nephew, but she has some art and she and she was really um concerned about where the art would end up and and what would happen after she died with all of her things.

and we ended up talking for a long time and became friends and she sold me her art and I promised I would make sure it was safe and that I'm sure that whoever bought it would would love it.

And this particular piece that I'm thinking of was um a sketch from Germany when she had traveled in her 20s.

She traveled to Germany and she framed it and now she's in her 70s and and dying and she sold it to me.

So, I put it on the wall and two days later, a regular customer here walked past that piece of art and said, "I went there in college.

I know that building and she bought it and now she's going to love it for the rest of her life and it's going to go someplace else when she dies, too."

So, I don't know if there's anything more beautiful than that in terms of like humans connecting with humans, right?

We are turning the page this evening.

Our next guest is Jennifer Jubenville from the bookstore at Fiters.

Jennifer, thank you for being here.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

We are happy to have you.

And to begin this discussion of our our local bookstores in town, how would you describe the personality and identity of the bookstore at Vickers?

Oh, wow.

Um, first of all, I love Fitkers.

Um, Fiters, you know, has been in the space where it is since 1881 when it was built as a as a brewery to pull water from the lake to brew the beer.

And and the Fiters complex is just such so neat.

It's got just a great feel for it.

And we try to um echo that throughout the store as well.

Um, we really aim to be cozy.

We aim to have a good selection for a lot of different types of customers, but um really we want to echo the historic aspect of it and and welcome people into the store.

Sure.

And your store focuses primarily on new books, right?

How do you tie in local authors with that selection?

Yeah.

So, we have a process for going through local authors can drop off their works to be reviewed and and if it fits our um what we're going for and if it's something that we think is going to appeal to customers, we never want to dissuade a local author and make them think that their book is is taking up shelf space and have it not get sold um because it can also be really humbling for a local author to find their book on the bargain cart.

So, we try to find stuff that's a good mix and and um then, you know, we try to work with authors and get them to have um signings when it's appropriate and and uh we really have a very big um and prominent regional section that we work to focus on.

How do you narrow down your selection?

There's millions and millions of books.

How do you narrow your selection down?

Um, sometimes it's a guessing game, sometimes it's gut, sometimes it's based on what has sold really well for us in the past.

I mean, there's a few just like customers have auto buy authors when they um know that a William Kent Krueger is coming out with a new book, you know, they know they're going to go buy that.

Um, we have certain authors that we just know if they're coming out with a new book, we're going to we're going to get it.

We're going to be stocking it.

And then um we try to work with our sales reps from the publishing houses and um take their recommendations and do research um you know but sometimes it's a guessing game.

Sure.

Yeah.

And bookstores are often hubs in the community where people gather.

What type of events do you put on at your store?

We have three different types of author events.

We have um signings where authors set up shop in the hallway at Fitkars um and in our store as well and people can come by and meet the author and just have a very informal chat with them and and get a signed book.

Then we have um our author talks um like we have one coming up this coming Tuesday with Tasha Corel who wrote Matchmaking for Psychopaths and Wendy Webb um who's written a lot of books set on the Northshore.

And those are two authors just in conversation with one another.

People can come in, they can have appetizers and and just get to know authors on a really personal level.

um purchase a copy of the book and then we have some feature um events that we hold in the spirit of the north theater that we do for bigger authors like when Cara Goucher's book came out and and Patty Wetling's booka came out and so those are really a lot of fun and and there's just so many different types of things that we can do.

How have expectations from customers changed throughout the years?

Many people are reading on electronic devices.

Yeah, I personally still like the paper.

I need the page.

Yep.

Well, I think one really neat thing is that there are national um companies that support independent bookstores, and that's something that we didn't see about 10 years ago.

And um Libro FM is an audiobook um app that is similar to Audible, but um Audible is owned by that horrible website whose name I don't say.

Um Libro, they support independent bookstores.

And so 30% of your purchases go to support independent bookstores.

Um and Bookshop.org is now there to sell ebooks.

And so we have something for everybody.

And if someone comes in and they say, "No, I really only like to read ebooks because I want to reduce clutter and I want to have less things to dust in my house."

We certainly understand that and we can talk to them about bookshop.org.

Sure.

Definitely.

What do you see as the future of independent bookstores?

I think the the number one goal um of independent bookstores is to connect readers and writers and to help put a book that someone's going to want to read.

Um websites can sell books that they want to sell you, you know, based on the algorithm and, you know, all sorts of different scientific formulas.

Um, but we can come in, we can listen to them, we can talk to the customer and find out what it is that they're interested in and send them home with their next favorite book.

And nothing makes me prouder than when we have a family that comes up once a year.

They stop in our store and they come back and say, you know, last year you sold me this book and I loved it.

What have you got for me this year?

So that's exciting.

Making that connection.

Yeah, I love that.

Absolutely.

And what is your We have about 30 seconds left.

What is your favorite part of your job running a bookstore?

I think making making those connections and and knowing that we've um gotten the opportunity to sell someone a book that they maybe wouldn't have heard of otherwise um an author that they wouldn't have necessarily heard of otherwise and introducing that um to them whether it be just through the written word on the page or um by actually allowing readers and writers to meet one another face to face.

Well, you're very inspirational.

You want me to?

You made me want to come in and check out the store.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for being here.

We appreciate it.

Thank you.

[Music] Please welcome our final guest this evening, Sarah Brown, manager here at Zenith Books in West Duth.

Sarah, thank you for joining us.

Great to be here.

You're on the opposite side of town.

We just had Jennifer in.

We are.

What sets your store aside from others in town?

Well, we are a proudly independent bookstore.

We sell new and used books, um, which is a great mix.

Um, we love our neighborhood in West Duth.

We're definitely a neighborhood community-based, um, store.

Um, we have a great partner in Wusos right across our parking lot.

So, you can get a cup of coffee, come in, browse some books.

Um, and I think we just have our own personality based on the the books we carry, the customers that come in.

Um, and our little West Duth neighborhood.

Sure.

Yeah.

Jennifer mentioned they sell new, you sell new and used.

Kind of different a little bit there.

So, explain how you connect with the local community, the local neighborhood that you're in.

Well, we do host um events.

We do a lot of donations for local schools, things like that.

We have book fairs.

Um we host parties in our parking lot sometimes like on the store anniversary or the solstice.

Um also just talking to people as they come in.

Um people can bring in their used books to trade in.

Um and you really get to know someone when you look over a stack of their books that they've read and they're bringing back.

Um, and yeah, we just love all of our neighbors and um, we love uh, just having regulars and having conversations with people every day.

You mentioned that you've been in the business for was it 25 years?

Uh, yes.

How have things changed?

That's that's a long time.

Yeah, I think um, you know, when we first started it was um, the little indie stores versus the big box stores.

Now, as Jennifer said, there are certain other websites.

Um, there was the e-reader panic when we wondered if physical books were going to go away, but it turns out that people really enjoy the oldest technology that we have, the written word on paper.

Um, so we love that.

And, um, just, you know, every season what people are reading changes.

There's different trends based on what's going on in the world and, um, you know, what people are interested in learning about.

Tell me a little bit about just the importance of of reading and and supporting local stores.

Um, right now this is of paramount importance.

Um, books are getting banned.

Um, you know, people's attention spans because of devices and technology are getting shorter.

Um, there's a lot of stuff going on that people are concerned about, worried about, um, scared for the future.

Um, and we really see them turning to independent bookstores to come read, to learn about things that have happened in the past that might mirror what's going on and just learn how to kind of stand up for what they believe in.

Sure.

We asked uh Jennifer about ways to stay sustainable and grow your business.

What are you doing at Zenith?

Um, we really love having events trying to get, you know, big authors to come in.

Um, obviously used books is sustainable not only economically, but it's also financially great to um for people to be able to buy a cheaper book um because it's used.

Um, and we just really love again connecting with the community, getting our name out there, partnering with local organizations like Ako and the library, the Damiano Center.

Um, so just being like a solid foundation and community gathering place in Duth is important to us.

Do you see a lot of repeat customers or or new folks coming in?

Maybe tourists throughout town?

Yeah, we do.

We have we have a really good base of regulars.

Um people that come in once a week, twice a week.

Um we recognize their names when the online orders come in and we say, "Oh, of course so and so's ordering this."

But we also get a good amount of people that stop um on their way up north.

Um we're only a block and a half off of 35.

So, I think people know it's a good place you can stop and get food, gas, and a good book or puzzle for your cabin.

What is a good read right now?

What are people into this summer?

Oo, there's a lot of It's a It's kind of a um balance of opposites.

There's a lot of like escapist um romantic, sci-fi, fantasy books.

And then there's a lot of again the political philosophy and sort of people reading dystopian classics um like Handmaid's Tale, Parable of the Sewer.

Um and then we sell a ton of local and regional books and a ton of nature and outdoors books because obviously Duthians love to get outside.

So, you kind of see with the political climate and and big topics in the news, you see people wanting to read those kind of things.

Yes, definitely.

Um, one of our strongest sellers right now is the little book on tyranny that you can kind of keep in your handbag and consult if you're feeling a little anxious, give away to people that you want to sort of, you know, make aware of things that you you think are important.

And what is your favorite part of your job?

What keeps you coming back for 25 years?

Yes.

Yes.

Um, on a very petty level, I would say giving stickers to kids when they come in is one of my favorite things.

Um, but just having conversations about books, like who gets to do that for a living?

It's amazing.

One of my favorite things.

And I'm sure you see many generations coming in too, correct?

Yes, definitely.

I think um, one of the strongest sections in any bookstore is always the kids section because even if people are tightening up, they don't want to spend money on themselves, they always want to buy books for their kids.

They want their kids to be educated, learn about the world, have a sense of wonder and fantasy in the world, and just, you know, great entertainment.

Sure.

Is there anything else that you'd like to add?

Um, I would say just stop in or go to zenithbookstore.com.

We have um everything in the store, used and new, is on our website.

And yeah, come visit us, say hi.

Wonderful.

And we're we're heading back into school.

Might be a good time to come in and catch up on that summer reading.

Yes, exactly.

Sarah, thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

Yeah.

Well, that's it for this week's show.

Go out and enjoy your weekend.

I'm Brett Scott.

Thanks for joining us.

Have a great night.

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