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Hundreds of workers in Windom, Minnesota are out of a job starting Friday. We talk with two people who are trying to help them figure out what to do. And we talk with Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara after more than six months on the job. It has been over a decade since lesbian, gay, and bisexual people were barred from the military. A Minnesota LGBTQ+ magazine has since created a new relationship with the National Guard. Across Minnesota and the nation, new and more diverse independent bookstores have been popping up – find out what’s behind their success. All that, plus the latest in Lynx, Twins, and other sports news.

The Lynx are still looking for the first win of their season. The Minnesota Aurora pre-professional women’s soccer team has had a dazzling start to theirs. The Twins? They’re doing okay. Wally Langfellow and Eric Nelson joined MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer with their take on what’s happening on the Minnesota sports scene.

Across Minnesota and the nation, new and more diverse independent bookstores have been popping up. In fact, for every independent bookstore that has closed since 2020, more than three new ones have opened, according to the American Booksellers Association.

It’s part of a continuing trend jumpstarted by the pandemic, and each of these bookstores has a story of its own. 


When Josh Hames saw the storefront up for lease in West St. Paul, he knew it was perfect for a bookstore. It was late at night, and the lights on the side of the building illuminated the old brick building. He could see the tall ceilings through the windows.  

“It looked like the cover to ‘Needful Things’ by Stephen King a little bit,” he said.  

Hames, 30, opened Other Skies Weird Fiction in 2022, just in time for his favorite holiday: Halloween. The store sells high-quality editions of horror, sci-fi and imaginative fiction. Hames has been collecting these genres since he was 14, but the pandemic shutdown really clarified that passion.


“We all had time to reflect on, what are the things that we really, really like to do when we go out? And for me I found that, even before the pandemic, I would always spend all my time looking for books, at Goodwill, thrift shops, estate sales. I was always out there buying books, and I thought, man, that's really important, I want to be a part of that,” he said.

It turns out, others do, too, and Hames said he’s been blown away by the community of readers who share his interest.


A couple hundred miles to the northwest, in Detroit Lakes, Minn., Amy Erickson was feeling the lack of a bookstore in her town. The closest one was about a half-hour away, ever since the local Book World closed.

“And when they closed, I said, ‘I don’t know that I can live in a town without a bookstore.’ It just felt wrong somehow,” Erickson said.

Erickson was a 49-year-old stay-at-home mother of three. When the pandemic hit and her husband suddenly stopped traveling for work, they had some big family discussions.

“And I said, you know, if I don’t do this by the time I’m 50, I’m probably never going to do it,” she said. “I don’t want to live knowing that I there was something that I wanted to do and I could do and I just didn’t do it.”


In May 2022, she took a leap of faith and launched Bluebird Books. It’s a family affair: Her three teenage kids are now all old enough to work in the store, along with some of their friends.  

“I love being surrounded by books all the time,” she said. “My favorite thing in the world is when someone walks back into the bookstore and says, ‘You recommended that book to me, and I absolutely loved it. What else? What other recommendations do you have?’ That makes my heart happy.” 


Bluebird Books and Other Skies Weird Fiction are two of the 15 new independent bookstores that have opened in Minnesota since March 2020. That’s a big rise, and it’s in line with a regional and national trend.

Carrie Obry is the executive director of the Midwest Independent Booksellers Association. She credits the rise in part to Bookshop.org, the website that lets people buy books online and shares the profit with indie bookstores. She says having that online platform has democratized the bookselling industry. 

“There’s just a whole new influx of wonderful much-needed energy and diversity coming through our ranks of bookstore owners,” Obry said.

There are challenges, of course, for any bookstore: competition for customers’ time and attention, accelerating rent rates in an industry prone to low wages and supply chain issues. 


Former educator Mary Taris never expected to open a bookstore. When she got fed up with not seeing enough great children’s books by authors of color, she started Strive Publishing in 2018.

She quickly found the need was far greater than a one-woman publisher could address. After the murder of George Floyd, Taris said S

More than a thousand workers at the Windom, Minn. hog slaughtering plant, Hylife, face their last day of work Friday. That's at least partially a result of the hog industry taking a downturn this year. In early April, Manitoba-based HyLife announced plans to close the Windom plant if they could not find a buyer and soon after that, they filed for bankruptcy.

Closing the plant will have big reverberations in the area. Workers who came to this country for those jobs will have to find a new one quickly, or leave the U.S.







Read more HyLife H-2B employees face unknown future







MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer talked with two people who are helping workers affected by the Windom Hylife plant layoffs.

Gabby Nelson has facilitated the aid response to the Hylife layoffs through the Windom Cultural Integration Collaborative, a group formed to welcome the hundreds of Hylife workers on temporary H2B visas that came to Windom.

Maria Guerrero is a community health worker with Wellshare International in Mankato. She has worked to find solutions for the hundreds of laid-off Hylife workers who live in hotels in the Mankato area. The majority of those workers arrived from the Mexico border.

It has been nearly seven months since Brian O’Hara was confirmed as the police chief of Minneapolis. As the first police chief appointed after George Floyd died under a Minneapolis police officer's knee, O'Hara is entrusted with changing the culture within MPD as the world watches. MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer talked with Chief O’Hara about what he has done so far and what remains on his to-do list.

It has been over a decade since Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed. The policy was issued under President Clinton in 1993, and it prohibited openly gay, lesbian and bisexual recruits from serving in the military. MPR News Host Cathy Wurzer talked with Lavender CEO Stephen Rocheford and Major General Shawn Manke about the story behind the first national guard recruitment ad to be printed in a publication for the LGTBQ+ community.