Minnesota Now

State senators are about to debate a bill that would create a paid family and medical leave program. We'll talk to one of the bill's authors about how it's different from a House version that passed last week — and how it could change work in Minnesota.

Rural newspapers are struggling. We'll dig into what it means for a community when the local paper shuts down, and what solutions might help reverse the decline.

And the sun is out, trees are greening up and flowers are beginning to bloom. And you may be wondering what to do with your yard, garden or balcony. The author of a new book has some advice for finding your outside style.

It’s finally warm enough to be out on the patio, taking in some sunshine — and maybe noticing your dirty and cobbled together deck furniture needs some work, not to mention the slightly ragged-looking bushes and other landscaping.

Ryan McEnaney has some advice for getting started.

McEnaney is a Woodbury-based garden designer and author of the book “Field Guide to Outside Style.” He is a fifth-generation family owner at Bailey Nurseries, a 115-year-old nursery headquartered outside of St. Paul, Minnesota. The company has grown (pun intended) to be one of the largest producers of shrubs and trees in the United States.

He talked with MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer.

Rural newspapers are struggling. Over the past twenty years, a quarter of Minnesota’s local newspapers closed – most of those in greater Minnesota.

That’s according to a new report from Minnesota’s Center for Rural Policy and Development.

Reed Anfinson is familiar with the industry’s challenges. Anfinson is publisher and owner of the Swift County Monitor-News in Benson, the Grant County Herald in Elbow Lake and the Stevens County Times in Morris.

He spoke with MPR News host Cathy Wurzer.

Minnesota State Senators are set to vote today on whether workers and employers would pay a new tax to set up a statewide family and medical leave system.

A similar bill passed by a slim margin in the House last week.

Under the Senate plan, workers could get up to 20 weeks of combined family and medical leave in one year.

MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer spoke with DFL Senator Liz Boldon, who is co-author of the bill.

Kara Goucher has come a long way from running up and down the hills of Duluth, Minnesota as a teenager.

Goucher is a two-time Olympian and medal-winning marathoner. Her new book, “The Longest Race,” details her rise from her first race at six years old, to becoming a decorated runner.

Goucher is known as much for her elite athleticism as she is for holding powerful people to account in the sports world.

She spoke with MPR News host Emily Bright.

In April, the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis premiered an adaptation of a beloved children’s film of the 1980s.  

“An American Tail” tells the story of Fievel Mousekewitz, a Jewish mouse who faces religious persecution in Russia. Fievel comes to America, where he and his family have been promised there are “no cats.”  

It's a story of immigration and community organizing. Tony Award-winner Itamar Moses wrote the new script and lyrics for the show and spoke with MPR News Arts Reporter Jacob Aloi. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.  

Yes and no. On the deepest level, you're always just trying to write something that feels truthful. And sort-of soundly constructed, and where the story works, and the thing moves [for] young audiences. And adult audiences both appreciate that.  

The other thing is that I'm adapting a film that already has all of these sorts of [young adult] elements built in, you know, it's a fable about anthropomorphized animals, right, it has like a fairytale quality. 

That the bar is, if anything, slightly higher, in terms of attention span and things you can hook into, in a way that is accessible. Not dumbing it down because, actually, kids are super smart. They're smarter than we give them credit for. And they like being told the truth, because they're being lied to all the time in their lives by adults. But there's something — it makes you want to lean into the magic and the metaphor a little bit more, I think, than with adults. 

[In] both “The Band’s Visit” and “American Tail,” the first thing I did was sit down with the movie open on my laptop screen, playing it scene-by-scene with a text document open next to it.  

And then, just as I went through it, asking myself, okay, what within this piece, will hold just as well translated directly to the stage with no changes, and then you start sort of building it that way. You end up with a bunch of stuff that you can just take directly from the source material. And then there are gaps.  

Even though “American Tail” has some songs, it only has three or four. So even if we kept them all, and I think we kept three of the four, you needed to write new ones to fill out a score.

“Band’s Visit” didn't have songs except [for] the diegetic music that the band performs. So in both cases, then you have this text that you're building the songs up on top of like, this is the foundation? And can we drill down into this moment? Can we cannibalize this moment for it for a song all by myself? 

It's funny because it's true that for the first 15 years of my career, I almost never wrote characters who are explicitly Jewish where it seemed relevant to the story. I think I had this instinctive aversion to being pigeonholed as this or that kind of writer. I was like, “Oh, no, my play is universal.” 

And then I think, gradually, the longer you do this, you realize more and more that the more hyper-specific something is, there's this paradoxical way in which it feels it feels more universal, first of all, and secondly, that you're actually preventing yourself from going to the deepest places you possibly can, by not mining what's most deeply yours. 

“The Band's Visit” was a real turning point for me ... it was close to the first time that something I'd written anything, for instance, set in Israel, that was the first time I'd ever done that. All of my work since then has leaned in one way or another, I think a little bit more strongly into that, sometimes very subtly. 

And then sometimes, you know, it just depends [on] what's called for by the piece. Like, not everything is about that. And then it's also made me think more deeply about the specific identity of each character. And sometimes you want that —not to necessarily be part of the script, like, oh, actually, we could cast this in 50 different ways. And it's super interesting to do that. But I think the responsible thing to do is make a choice about which you're doing and why.  

Now I feel extra motivated to do that. Because I've been made aware of my Jewishness in sort of a negative way in this country. I haven't felt that overt sort of feeling of antisemitism is anything other than like this fringe thing that existed but didn't impact my life very much at all. That was how it felt for most of my life.

And in the last five years, and then even more so in the last year or two, I've suddenly felt it in a new way. And so that's made me, I think, want to double down on that a little bit more, 

It's really a story about immigration, about how America is made up of waves and waves of immigrants. And the choice every wave of immigrants has, once they've sort of established themselves and figured out some zone of safety.  

If that indeed happens. Do you turn around and hold that territory? You know, do guard it jealously, and, or do you sort of pay it forward in a different way and try to be more welcoming to the waves that come after you. 

So that feels like the core of what this story is … the fact that the Mousekewitzes have to flee Russia because of pogroms is the inciting incident ... but then it's about how that weaves with all of these equivalent stories and analogous in various ways stories that everybody has, or every mouse has. 

But, in a subtle way, it has felt like a great outlet for some of the feelings that of having had been having about this stuff generally.

To include things like Jewish prayers, like prayers in Hebrew, you know, that are sung because here we are doing this musical and, you know, we slip in. The opening scene as a Hanukkah party, right? So, getting to do that stuff on stage, and put some of that stuff sort of explicitly out there, has felt like a subtle form of defiance.  

The numbers are stark: Native Americans make up only 1 percent of the Minnesota's population but 9 percent of missing and murdered women and girls. And Black women are murdered at a rate three times higher than white women in Minnesota. Behind each of these numbers are the lives of loved ones. As part of a national awareness day Friday, advocates will gather in Bemidji, Duluth, and on the Capitol lawn. MPR News Host Emily Bright talked with Nicole Matthews, executive director of the Minnesota Indian Women's Sexual Assault Coalition, which is organizing the event in Saint Paul.

Shortages of several essential medications are putting Minnesotans in a serious bind. We’ll take a look at the reasons behind the shortages, the impact on patients, and how Minnesota's medical industry is handling it.

Minnesotans are raising awareness for missing and murdered indigenous and black women at a state capitol event tomorrow. Listen for how a partnership between several communities is fighting for change.

In the 1986 animated children’s movie "An American Tail," the Mousekewicz family, who are mice, flee religious persecution in Russia and come to America. It's a story of immigration and community organizing—and it's now a timely new musical playing at the Minnesota Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis through June 18th.

MPR Arts Reporter Jacob Aloi sat down with the show's playwright, Itamar Moses, who also won a Tony Award for the musical "The Band's Visit," to ask about turning a film into a stage show.

MPR News host Emily Bright followed that conversation with a discussion with Temple Israel’s Senior Rabbi, Marcia Zimmerman, about the impact of having explicitly Jewish characters in children’s stories.

The Minnesota House has approved a paid family and medical leave bill. Our senior political reporter Dana Ferguson gives us the details.

Lawmakers are also considering new gun bills. We'll take a closer look at what's known about the efficacy of what are called "red flag" laws.

Cinco de Mayo is Friday. We'll hear from the owners of a landmark restaurant in St. Paul's District del Sol.

We'll hear an episode of an award-winning podcast from the North Shore that may get you thinking differently about the history of the North Shore.

Chief meteorologist Paul Huttner will tell us whether milder temperatures will prevail, explain this spring's record CO2 reading, and more.

And the question on every gardener's mind: is it safe to plant? We'll ask an expert.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation. 

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