I was interviewed on MPR News by Euan Kerr, and he was charming. I made a good impression right from the start, with my serious preparation for the interview: he found me standing outside in the sun, smoking.

“No, no, you finish it”, he said, smiling. “I’m European, so I understand.”
This of course made me wonder what exactly he did understand. From what I’ve seen so far, very few people in Minnesota smoke, so maybe that was it. Or it might just have been a comment on me standing with my face towards the sun, as were I a lizard that needed sunshine to regulate my body temperature. He was from Scotland, so he should understand.
Apparently, he had first came here as a teacher on a summer camp, teaching archery. “Very boring, archery”, he said matter-of-factly.
“I think it sounds very exciting”, I said while trying to smoke faster.
“Five, six hours a day of teaching kids archery is very boring. Or boring, at best. Then someone walks in front of another’s bow and arrow and you age ten years in two seconds.”
“So boredom intersected with heart attacks?”
“That’s archery for you.”

Anyway, I continued to impress. The format called for me to read something from my book, for around four minutes. “I know just the scene”, I said, and then proceeded to look for it.

And look for it.

And so on, for an embarrasingly long time. I was looking for the scene where Sara re-organizes the bookshop and changes the categories. It’s fun. I’ve read it before, so I thought it might be good, lenght-wise. It’s just that the darn scene had somehow disappeared from the book. It was the only explanation I could think of for not being there, somewhere between when Sara opens the bookshop and when she sets out to convince Hope that Broken Wheel is a very literary town.

“Well, I guess you might not have worked with this edition before”, Euan said very generously as I was desperately turning pages.

But I managed to find it eventually, and the interview was great fun, and you can listen to both the interview and my reading from the mysteriously missing scene here: https://twitter.com/thethreadmpr