In western Minnesota, a writer rooted in two worlds seeks common ground
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In every corner of Minnesota, there are good stories waiting to be told of places that make our state great and people who in Walt Whitman’s words “contribute a verse” each day. MPR News sent longtime reporter Dan Gunderson on a mission to capture those stories as part of a new series called “Wander & Wonder: Exploring Minnesota’s unexpected places.”
For many years, Brent Olson walked by a large rock in his yard with the year 1897 carved on one side and thought, “Geez, I gotta do something with that.”
The rock was among the remains of a wall that once held up a barn built by his great-grandfather. Now those rocks make up a wall in a one-room writers’ cabin with a sod roof and a window overlooking a small lake.
At 70, Olson has been a farmer, a county commissioner, a short order cook and — most importantly to him — a writer. He’s firmly rooted in two worlds — a “bleeding-heart liberal” in the middle of rural Minnesota Trump country. In his writing, he tries to bring understanding to both.
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He's written a weekly, nationwide syndicated column since 1996 that reaches several hundred thousand mostly rural readers. He says he understands the feelings of disenfranchisement that he believes turned many rural people toward President-elect Donald Trump.
“People feel like there’s forces out there that are beyond their sight, that are controlling their lives, and there’s a certain validity to that,” said Olson. “There’s a lot of very powerful people, people with a lot of money, who influence the world we live in and we just have no clue except we see things that we don’t quite understand.”
Olson thinks his Big Stone County neighbors cut him some slack on his politics because he’s a western Minnesotan native focused on making the community a better place.
“I’m a bleeding-heart liberal living in a county that voted for Trump, so we don’t get invited out a lot,” he chuckles. “But on the other hand, in my last two elections for county commissioner, I won despite having a Black Lives Matter sign at the end of my mailbox.”
His roots and involvement in western Minnesota run deep. About a dozen years ago, he wrote a grant application with the goal of reopening the café in the small town of Clinton, “And the damn fools at the Bush Foundation gave me $75,000,” he said with a hearty laugh.
By the time the café was up to code he couldn’t afford to hire help so he became the early morning cook. He called it the Inadvertent Café.
“Since there was no profit motive, I wasn’t planning on making any money, it was really fun,” he said. “I charged five bucks for everything.”
Eventually he gave the café away, but it closed after the building was damaged in a storm.
His “Independently Speaking” column touches on a wide range of topics and seems to connect with his target audience. “The readers I meet seem to have a fondness for me,” said Olson. “They think of me as the loudmouth cousin at the end of the Thanksgiving dinner table, the one who always has an opinion about stuff.”
At one point Olson said he had more than 1 million weekly readers, but a dispute with an editor of one of the largest publications to carry his work cut his market in half. “I have a ferocious resistance to being told what to do, which has not always been an asset career wise,” said Olson with a rueful laugh. “So that was what I refer to as my $10,000 a year email.”
In recent years he’s turned to writing novels that focus on issues he feels strongly about.
His most recent include “Between the Helpless and the Darkness,” an alternative history tale taking readers 1,000 years into the past to ponder how choices change the world, and “Angr,” about “wrongness in the world and an unimportant man’s crusade to change things.”
The fourth generation in his family to farm — he’s now retired from farming and will soon retire from politics — Olson will have more time to write and ponder life.
He sees echoes across the generations in his own family.
“My great grandparents came here from Norway because they were trying to do the right thing for their family,” said Olson.
Three of his grandchildren are adopted from Ethiopia and they are also here seeking a better life.
“And if you looked at pictures of them, you’d go ‘well, these people have nothing in common,’” said Olson. But they have everything in common. Really, a lot of us have a lot more in common than we think we do, but that’s because we’re not listening to all the voices. They all really need to be heard.”
Olson plans to keep writing for as long as he can. He jokes that his parents lived into their 90s and “still had their marbles,” so if he’s careful he has a couple of decades left to be productive.
“John Wesley had a prayer that went, ‘Please, God, don’t let me live long enough to be useless.’ And that’s something I want to emulate. I want to be in there, scratching and clawing for as long as possible to say things that I think matter.”