September 24, 2025
By Patrick Hicks
My latest book was a joy to write. It took three years to finish and I traveled some 6,500 miles around my home state of Minnesota. Although I never really saw myself as a travel writer, that’s exactly what I’ve become with this book. The project, to my ongoing surprise, came to me like an accidental gift.
I’m primarily known as a novelist and for the last fifteen years I’ve written three books about the Holocaust: The Commandant of Lubizec (2014), In the Shadow of Dora (2020), and most recently, Across the Lake (2023). These novels required an incredible amount of research and time. I’ve interviewed survivors, read scores of books, and done many research trips to concentration camps across Germany and Poland in order to get the history correct. In other words, everything I wrote was about the murderous events that took place in Europe between 1933 and 1945. However, you can only spend so much time in the darkness before you need to move back into the light. For my own mental health, I needed to turn my attention elsewhere. But what to write about? What new direction to take?
Happily, Indiana University Press contacted me about writing the first book for their new series, Heartland History. Each state in the Midwest will be showcased and, if I was interested, I would set the tone for the books to follow. After talking with the series editor, Jon Lauck, I began to envision a narrative that was part history book and part travelogue. The idea of writing about places I’d heard about my whole life but hadn’t yet visited was intriguing. And if I approached my home state like a foreigner, I’d see Minnesota as if it were a new place. After all, I’d lived in Europe for seven years—Northern Ireland, Germany, England, Spain—and I loved traveling around those countries in wide-eyed wonder. Why not treat Minnesota the same way?
Aside from reading plenty of books and articles, I traveled to nearly every corner of the state. This meant lazing up the North Shore and learning what this part of the state was like 300 years ago when the French, Ojibwe, and Dakota traded for fur. It meant spending time on the Iron Range and going to the US Hockey Hall of Fame. And of course, it meant visiting Hibbing to see Bob Dylan’s childhood house. Did you know that Greyhound—the famous bus line—started in Hibbing? Me neither. Every chapter in Greater Minnesota is full of surprises like this.
I also visited the Mayo Clinic, a world class aviation museum hidden on the prairie, the humble start of the Mississippi River, and something called the “Lost Forty” which is home to pine trees that are over 250 years old. Due to a mapping error in the late 1800s, this area in northern Minnesota was never touched by lumberjacks. It was stunning to walk beneath trees that are, quite literally, as old as the United States. The pinecones on the ground were as large as my hand. I also visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs, which is the oldest record of human thought in Minnesota, and quite possibly the Midwest. These images are 7,000 years old and they represent ancient stories, beliefs, and daily life. To stand in front of these petroglyphs—many of which were carved when wooly mammoths roamed the land—is to see Minnesota history in a new and necessary light. After all, these images are thousands of years older than the pyramids on the Giza Plateau.
It wasn’t all serious stuff I visited, though. I went to the SPAM Museum because, well, of course I did. It was quirky and fun and, if I’m being honest, the section on SPAM is one of my favorites in the book. So too is the chapter on the Minnesota State Fair. With all due respect to other state fairs, the one in Minnesota is easily one of the best in the nation. If you haven’t gone, you’re missing out on a vital Midwest experience. It seemed only fitting to end my book with an event that brings Minnesotans together. No wonder the fair is known as the “Great Minnesota Get-Together”.
When I agreed to write Greater Minnesota, I didn’t realize how much fun I’d have. I hope readers sense my awe as they travel with me down the back roads of the Land of 10,000 Lakes. After living abroad for so many years, it did me good to turn my attention to home, and see it anew.
Patrick Hicks grew up in Stillwater, Minnesota, and is an Irish American novelist, poet, and essayist. After living in Europe for many years, he now lives in the Midwest where he is the Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University as well as a faculty member in the MFA program at the University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the author of over ten books, including The Commandant of Lubizec and Across the Lake.