| Last month, I told you about the glories of a pilgrimage to Red Cloud, Neb., where you can wade into the swaying tall grasses of the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie and visit the museum named for her. How lucky to witness the landscape that fired Willa Cather’s imagination! I’ll be back with more writer’s road trips in the coming months. Today I want to make a case for putting a sensational bookstore at the center of an expedition in the United States or abroad. The best independent bookstores see themselves as aspirational town squares for original thinking, as voices for a civic and civil life in their neighborhoods, as places of retreat, reinvention and reinvigoration. To launch this occasional series I’m headed south to Iowa City, Iowa, to Prairie Lights Bookstore. The name evokes a refuge, an inviting sanctuary, glimmering at the edge of a wintry Midwestern void. Jim Harris, Prairie Lights’ founder, not only liked the imagery that the name conjured, but he admired the phonesthetic -- the inherent beauty -- of the words put next to one another. He’d heard them in Gordon Lightfoot’s "Alberta Bound." “Oh the prairie lights are burnin’ bright, The Chinook wind is a movin in. Tomorrow night I’ll be Alberta bound, Though I’ve done the best I could…" Language - the sound of it, the gut punch, roiling, soothing, catalyzing, transformative, earth quaking power of it - has ensured the survival of this indie bookstore even as Iowa City’s other bookstores have closed. Established in the spring of 1978, the store has been embraced by the prestigious Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa and often stocks debut novels of the workshop’s graduates next to bestsellers, classics and collections of poetry. Look for Midwestern born and bred books by Marilynne Robinson, Jane Smiley, Mia Mercado, Louise Erdrich, Erika Sanchez, Bonnie Jo Campbell and Jennifer Seuss. The writer Neil Gaiman argues that a town isn’t a town without a bookstore. If you have a favorite bookstore in Minnesota or anywhere else, share it with me via Twitter at KerriMPR or by email.
— Kerri Miller | MPR News | 