Conversations from the Barn

Today on the podcast, we are sharing a conversation from the end of our 2025 Artist Retreat season with writer and musician Suzanne Ohlmann and audio producer Julie Censullo. Julie and Suzanne both were deeply inspired by each other during their retreat week — they say they fell into an easy rhythm of wandering, gathering, cooking, and creating stories together. In this conversation, we talk about the magic of connection that artists find at Everwood. Learn more about Suzanne here: instagram.com/sodangwilde and more about Julie here: juliecensullo.com

Molly Beth Griffin is the author of four picture books: Ten Beautiful Things, The Big Leaf Leap, Rhoda's Rock Hunt, and Loon Baby. She has also published a young adult novel, Silhouette of a Sparrow, two chapbooks of poetry, and a series of beginning readers. Two more picture books are forthcoming in 2024: Rings of Heartwood: Poems on Growing and Just Us. Silhouette of a Sparrow (winner of the Milkweed Prize for Children's Literature) was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and ForeWord's Book of the Year, and was featured on ALA's Rainbow List and on the Amelia Bloomer List of Feminist Literature. Ten Beautiful Things received four starred reviews and was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. Rhoda's Rock Hunt won a Northeast Minnesota Book Award and a Jeanette Fair Book Award, and was a Star of the North nominee. Molly was the recipient of the 2014 McKnight Artist Fellowship in Children's Literature as well as two MSAB Artist Initiative Grants. Molly is represented by Jennifer Flannery of Flannery Literary. mollybethgriffin.com Juliet Patterson is the author of Sinkhole: A Legacy of Suicide (Milkweed Editions, September 2022), finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Awards and named one of the best memoirs of 2022 by Library Journal. She has also published two full-length poetry collections, Threnody, (Nightboat Books 2016), a finalist for the 2017 Audre Lorde Poetry Award, and The Truant Lover, (Nightboat Books, 2006), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2006 Lambda Literary Award. A recipient of the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in non-fiction, and a Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, she has also been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Minneapolis-based Creative Community Leadership Institute (formerly the Institute for Community and Creative Development). She teaches creative writing and literature at St. Olaf College and is also a faculty member and director of the college's Environmental Conversations program. She lives in Minneapolis on the west bank of the Mississippi near the Great River Road with her partner, the writer Rachel Moritz, and their son. www.julietpatterson.com

As a multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Vinnie has dedicated the majority of his life to making sense of the world through melody, rhythm, and verse. From, picking up the violin at age 12 and later busking on the streets of France, to learning to play the upright bass to set out on the road with the Last Revel, to finding the guitar as a tool to reimagine his process and find joy in playing with his indie-rock project Friend Dog, he's always felt that the song has been his only way to process his experiences in the world. He's found that a beginner's mind in his work is the only path to authenticity, and authentic, earnest expression, is really, the whole point of his music. TheLastRevel.com

Ben Noble is a Minneapolis-based artist and producer. Noble's serene, innocent melodies drift lithely along sonic textures that range from sleepy-time folk to intrusive, experimental hyper-synth scapes. Through any aural difference, the heart is the same: Noble wants to embody his truth and experiences in his music. bennoblemusic.com Chris Bartels is a producer, musician, husband, and father from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has spent hours upon hours of his life crafting textures, melodies, emotions, soundscapes, and stories through music. Bartels' musical obsessions are varied, plentiful, and often. anthemfallsmusic.com

Rachel Moritz is the author of two poetry books, Sweet Velocity (Lost Roads Press, 2017), and Borrowed Wave (Kore Press, 2015), as well as five chapbooks. She's also the co-editor of a collection of personal essays, My Caesarean: Twenty-One Mothers on the C-Section Experience and After (The Experiment, 2019), which won the Foreword INDIES Award in Silver. Rachel's work has appeared in American Letters and Commentary, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Iowa Review, Tupelo Quarterly, VOLT, Water-Stone Review, and other journals. Her poems and critical writing have been featured in Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Verse Daily, and in the anthologies Queer Nature, Rocked by the Waters: Poems of Motherhood, Uncoverage: Asking After Recent Poetry, and Jean Valentine: This World Company. She's received a 2019 Best American Essay Notable mention as well as awards, grants, and residencies. Rachel teaches creative writing with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, Unrestricted Interest, and CommonBond Communities. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son. www.rachelmoritz.com M. Ahd grew up moving frequently. They have resided in New Jersey, Iowa, Texas, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the Czech Republic. M has worked as a software company recruiter, sports camera operator, reader to the blind, and arts magazine writer, among other jobs. After teaching high school English and coaching Quiz Bowl for a decade, they now write from home full time. M has been the recipient of the 2016 Barnes and Nobel Regional My Favorite Teacher Contest, named the 2018 National High School Quiz Bowl Coach of the Year, and a finalist for the 2019 Loft Literary Center Mentor Series. M lives in Minneapolis with their spouse, two dogs named Zero and Eleven, and a rotating cast of teens and young adults in need of a spare room.

Debra J. Stone's poetry, essays and fiction can be found in Brooklyn Review, Under the Gum Tree, Random Sample Review, Green Mountains Review (GMR), About Place Journal, Saint Paul Almanac, Wild Age Press, Gyroscope, Tidal Basin, and forthcoming in other literary journals. She's received residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, New York Mills Arts Residency and is a Kimbilio Fellow. Sundress Publishers nominated her essay, Grandma Essie's Vanilla Poundcake, Best of the Net, judged by Hanif Abdurraquib in 2019 and in 2021 her poem, year-of- staying–in place, was nominated Best of Net and Pushcart nominated. www.debrajeannestone.com Anna Farro Henderson is a scientist and artist. She served as an environmental policy advisor to Minnesota Senator Al Franken and Governor Mark Dayton. Her publications have appeared in Kenyon Review, River Teeth, The Rumpus, The Common, The Doctor T.J. Eckleburg Review, Seneca Review, Water-Stone Review, Cleaver Magazine, Punctuate, The Normal School, Bellingham Review, and Identity Theory. She is a recipient of a Minnesota State Art Board grant, a Nan Snow Emerging Artist Award, an Excellence in Teaching Fellowship at the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and a Loft Literary Center Mentor Award. She founded The Nature Library art installation that was up in the Landmark Center in Saint Paul for several months in 2019. She teaches creative process at the Loft Literary Center. www.eafarro.com

KRISTI COLE kristicole.com Kristi Cole (she/her) is a Queer, Queens-based performer and choreographer with a Bachelors of Arts in Dance and Political Science from The George Washington University where she received the Elizabeth Burtner Theatre & Dance Award for her excellence as a performer, as well as a Luther Rice Research Fellowship. In 2019, she founded Kristi Cole & Guests with the mission of bringing together artists to create powerful and thought- provoking interdisciplinary work. Her stage and film work has been presented in the tri-state area and Atlanta, Georgia as well as in Toronto, Canada. MAX COKER Max Coker is a digital audio/visual performer and installation artist based in Brooklyn with a background in radio, sculpture, and software engineering. Education includes media studies, new media art, engineering and computer science from Stony Brook University and Brooklyn College. As an artist's assistant to collaborative duo LoVid based on Long Island, Max gained skills and knowledge of video technology and paradigms of video art performance. Performances fill spaces with improvised sound mixing and real time video composite projections using an amalgamation of custom software and a collection of found sound and video.

David Huckfelt has shared stages with a staggering diversity of artists: from Mavis Staples, Emmylou Harris & Greg Brown, to Bon Iver, Arcade Fire & Gregory Alan Isakov, and more recently an impressive array of Native American musicians including John Trudell, Quiltman, Keith Secola, and Annie Humphrey. In thousands of shows across the United States, Canada & overseas, Huckfelt's grassroots following has grown from small-town opera houses, Midwestern barn concerts, and progressive benefit events to national tours and festival stages like Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Edmonton and Calgary Folk Fests, and the legendary First Avenue club in his beloved Minneapolis home. Jeremy Ylvisaker is a multi-instrumentalist from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is a member of the indie rock bands Alpha Consumer along with Michael Lewis and JT Bates, and The Cloak Ox with Andrew Broder of Fog, Mark Erickson and Dosh. He plays guitar in Andrew Bird's touring band alongside Martin Dosh on drums and Michael Lewis on bass.