Cooler by the Lake: Recent Episodes
Sarah Eilefson
Fresh short fiction, persuasive insights, and rich conversations with emerging literary voices, all produced by students at the University of Minnesota Duluth.
Spend some time exploring the sounds of the north woods and soon you'll be saying it, too: It's always cooler by the lake.
This podcast is sponsored by the English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies department and the Chancellor's Office at UMD.
Enjoy a seat at the table as writer, folklorist, and performer GennaRose Nethercott discusses romance novels, heist skills, graduate study, mining the archive and more with members of the UMD Literary Guild.
Pull up a chair for an episode of history, folklore, and theatre as GennaRose Nethercott delivers a performance of her book Thistlefoot for UMD students, staff, faculty, and guests.
Note: This episode contains depictions of violence.
Host Connor Schwake explores the spooky side of the world with writer and folklorist GennaRose Nethercott, author of Thistlefoot. GennaRose kicked off our spring semester with a wintry visit to Duluth and UMD’s campus.
This episode has three parts.
First, an interview with the author. GennaRose and Connor discuss her use of folklore and the supernatural as a tool to examine life, experiences, emotions, and beyond, and Connor reflects on the complexity of using aspects of another group’s culture in literary production.
Next, we share with you selections from the live reading of the tales GennaRose provided to our UMD community earlier in the year.
Finally, we invite you to join our roundtable discussion with GennaRose and members of the UMD Literary Guild.
If you haven’t read Thistlefoot, jump in anyway. We’ll give you plenty of warning before we get to some spoilers — while offering plenty of enticement for what you’ll find if you decide to take the plunge.
As a companion to our debut episode of student stories, authors Jan Schober and Dakota Bond join host Connor Schwake for a conversation on experience, perception, and representation, all grounded in lived experiences in and around Duluth, Minnesota and Seoul, South Korea.
If you haven't listened to "A JeJu Tale" or "Aliens Exist!" yet, you'll want to go back to our third episode and start there. Or heck, go back to the beginning of the show and learn what we're all about!
In this episode, we debut our first two student stories. Host Connor Schwake brings us Dakota Bond's "A JeJu Tale," an American's account of traveling to South Korea, and Jan Schober reads "Aliens Exist!" You'll have to hear this one to believe it.
In this companion to Taylor Brorby's public lecture and reading of episode 1, host Connor Schwake sits down for an interview with the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land then brings you a discussion of poetry and prose with Taylor and the University of Minnesota Duluth's Literary Guild.
In our inaugural episode, host Connor Schwake introduces this podcast and the featured voice of our first two episodes: Taylor Brorby.
Taylor is author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land; Crude: Poems; Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience and co-editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. Taylor visited UMD's campus on September 22, 2022 for a public reading and discussion.