features

24 | Travel with us to meet Doug Ohman, a photographer who loves this state, and captures it beautifully on film.

Whether Ohman’s pictures are of churches, barns, school houses, cabins, courthouses or just some out-of-the-way places in Minnesota, people can relate to his work.

Ohman, who is based in New Hope and was born and raised in Anoka, has been called “Minnesota’s photographer” by some. Ohman’s pictures are worth a thousand words, and they are words that he gladly dispenses himself. One thing that Ohman may like to do more than take pictures is talk. In fact, he gives up to 100 speeches a year about his work.

30 | Humble poet center staged "A Man for all Reasons"

Larry Schug collects recyclable trash at the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph to make a living — and weaves insightful threads of vivid poetry to make a life.

Both pursuits fit seamlessly for Schug, who insists he wears only one hat in his seemingly disparate existence as the college’s recycling and delivery coordinator and campus mailman by day and a highly accomplished and widely published poet by night. “ I just have one life, one existence; that’s all,” he explained. “I have to work to make a buck to put food on the table and a roof over my head, and I write poems. It’s just what I do in my life. They’re not separate, not contradictory lives.” It’s a winning combination, in any case, as Schug learned in spades this past spring. He said he “hit the jackpot when the cherries lined up this year” and he won the 2008 McKnight Foundation’s Artist Fellowship award for Minnesota poets and spoken word artists. He bested 75 other contestants to take one of four $25,000 contest prizes, which are administered annually by the nationally renowned Loft Literary Center of Minneapolis.

52 | County Series; Celebrating northwestern Minnesota county by county

From the fertile farmland of the Red River Valley to plentiful lakes and woods, northwestern Minnesota presents a landscape of contrasts.

The land stretches flat and wide under big skies along the Minnesota and North Dakota border. Sunflowers, potatoes, sugar beets and other crops flourish here. Farther to the east and north, lakes lure those who enjoy fishing or the solitude of the water. The headwaters of the Mississippi River draw visitors to the beginning of a waterway that extends to the Gulf of Mexico.

We celebrate the smorgasbord variety of northwestern Minnesota in this, our third look at our state’s 87 counties. In this place of Paul Bunyan, potatoes and prairie, nature entices and lore beckons.