Will Weaver, author of Power & Light
Novel & Short Story Category, sponsored by Minnesota Humanities Center
Each week leading up to the 36th annual Minnesota Book Awards, we are featuring exclusive interviews with our finalists. You can also watch the authors in conversation with their fellow category finalists here.
What is one detail you wanted to include in this book, but couldn’t find a place for?
Though it’s literary and historical (set in the 1930s), Power & Light is fundamentally a crime novel. I had hoped for a tidy, happy ending but it wanted more complexity–more Dostoevsky than Agatha Christie.
Tell us about someone who proved instrumental to the creation of this book.
My mother, who passed in 2020 at age 100. She was sharp to the end (as we say), a source of living history into the Norwegian immigrant experience in the Midwest. My novel unfolds and re-imagines a traumatic event in her/my family.
Tell us about a favorite read from the past year. Why did you find it enjoyable, insightful, or memorable?
I can’t read novels when I’m writing one–an enormous and somewhat cruel joke played upon authors by the Gods of Literature.
Please tell us something about yourself that is not widely known.
I once belonged to the University of Minnesota sky-diving club.
Share your thoughts about the role and value of libraries.
How much time do we have? To shorten my reply, I direct you to Libraries of Minnesota (Minnesota Historical Society Press). I introduce the book, then tag off with other Minnesota authors who write their own love letters to the libraries in their lives.
Will Weaver is a PEN Award winner whose debut novel, Red Earth, White Earth, was produced as a CBS television movie. A Gravestone Made of Wheat & Other Stories won the Minnesota Book Award for Fiction, and the title story became the award-winning film “Sweet Land”.