Sue Leaf, author of Minnesota’s Geologist: The Life of Newton Horace Winchell
Emilie Buchwald Award for Minnesota Nonfiction, sponsored by Bookmobile Craft Digital
Each week leading up to the 33rd annual Minnesota Book Awards announcement, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our 36 finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
In a year defined by a pandemic and its fallout, virtually everything about our lives has changed in some way. How has COVID-19 impacted your writing habits and preferences? Has the unique zeitgeist of the past year influenced your writing output in any ways that you can pinpoint? 
At times, I have been too distracted to write. At others, I have poured my writing fervor into my journal. I tell myself that it is a perfect time to crank out meditative essays, but the fact is, I base my essays on actual visits to actual places and most of those places have been closed to me– can’t take a boat to the Apostle Islands, can’t visit the piping plover nests on Long Island, etc.–so I’ve been stymied.
Would you tell us one or two things about your finalist book that you are particularly proud of, and why? (Sure, it may feel a bit un-Minnesotan to say so, but it’s not boasting if we ask!)
There was a lot less personal material on Winchell than on T. S. Roberts, my previous biography subject, but I felt I created a vivid world of intellectual intensity at a young University of Minnesota, of which Winchell and his family were a part. I also showed (I hope) that Winchell was a very modern man in surprising ways, with multicultural work contacts, an unexpected job loss, and an encore career– to say nothing of a feminist wife with a life of her own.
What do you hope that your audience learns or takes away from your book?
I’d like readers to appreciate a scientific view of the natural world, to see with geological eyes, as I put it. I laid out the simplest concepts of geology in the book, and I’d like them to incorporate those concepts into their lives.
Minnesota enjoys a reputation as a place that values literature and reading. If this sentiment rings true for you, what about our home state makes it such a welcoming and conductive place for writers?
Everywhere one turns, there are book clubs, independent bookstores, interviews with authors on the radio, or as an evening’s entertainment. The written word saturates our communal life.
What advice would you give to an aspiring writer with an interest in your category?
Learn something before you write. Become, if not a master, adept in a science, or in an area of history– or whatever! Very few lead exceptional enough lives, or are perceptive enough that others will want to read your memoir. Immerse yourself in a body of knowledge first and then write about it.
Tell us something about yourself that is not widely known! (It doesn’t have to be about your writing.)
I once encountered a birdwatcher in the Rambles in NYC’s Central Park, spoke to him about the warbler we both were watching, and gasped when I recognized the president of National Audubon– only to gasp louder when he said, “Wait! Are you the author of “Potato City?””
Sue Leaf is an author and trained zoologist who has written multiple books on environmental topics. She is also editor of the newsletter of the Wild River Audubon Society of east-central Minnesota.