Somehow these four Minnesota authors will each publish three (or more) books in 2024

Kao Kalia Yang messed up the premise of this story with her answer to my very first question.

I wrote about four local authors who somehow managed to publish three books each this year.

“Actually, there are four books,” said Yang, who actually has a quartet of 2024 offerings.

She’s currently wrapping up promotional tours for the first three (the memoir “Where Rivers Part” and two books for young people, “Caged” and “The Rock in My Throat,” and the middle-grade novel “The Diamond Explorer,” due out in September). And in her spare time, she delivered the commencement address and received an honorary degree from her alma mater, Carleton College.

“It’s partly coincidence,” said Yang, who hasn’t published a book since 2021. “But I don’t really believe in coincidences, so it was intentional.”

Marcie R. Rendon has just published the poetry collection “Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium” and can also be found in the crime novel “Where They Last Saw Her.” The children’s book “Stitches of Tradition” will also be published in the fall. She has a theory about all this productivity: “An alien ship landed and blew us away.”

Of course, she’s kidding. Truthfully, Rendon and Yang have one thing in common: They don’t sleep much, which is also true of two other 2024 Minnesota Triple Threats: Ty Chapman, whose poetry collection “Tartarus” is already in stores, and who will release children’s books “James Finds the Beat” and “Stokes: The Brief Career of the NBA’s First Black Superstar” (co-written with fellow Minneapolis native John Coy) in October.

Also out now are Kate DiCamillo’s “Ferris” and “Orris and Timble: The Beginning” and her “Hotel Balzaar” will be in theaters in October.

At a time when layabout Donna Tartt hasn’t published anything since her 2013 bestseller The Goldfinch, it goes without saying that these authors continue to work tirelessly, but each approach works differently.

“Play with many different toys”

Yang, who has three young children, tends to tackle one project at a time, stealing time on the computer between meals and school.

Chapman, who jokes that his writing process is “more chaos and whimsy than science” and is currently working on two young adult novels, said: “I have a short attention span, so I get bored easily and like to play with lots of different toys. It was great to have shorter projects that I could jump to when I was feeling burned out or stuck or just wanted something different.”

Rendon also juggles projects, imagining her brain as a filing cabinet from which she can pull out any file she needs.

“I’ve been working on ‘Where They Last Saw Her’ since before Covid. And then came the children’s book that’s coming out in October, that just fit with (the publisher’s) schedule. I’ve been working on ‘Anishinaabe Songs for a New Millennium’ for over 20 years,” Rendon said.

“I’ve been in anthologies ad nauseam, but I’ve never had a collection of my poems, and I got – oh my – a residency at Franconia Sculpture Park last winter and had three weeks where I did nothing but go through every single poem I had.”

The pandemic didn’t have a major impact on Chapman’s books, although it did change the course of his career. When performance spaces closed in 2020, the puppeteer and theater artist focused on writing. But DiCamillo, like Rendon, found that the pandemic gave her more time than usual to focus on work.

“Everyone I talked to said, ‘I can’t do anything.’ For some reason I could and it saved me,” DiCamillo said. “I don’t know why it worked for me.”

DiCamillo said the months of staying at home during the pandemic had been good for his writing: “Before the pandemic, much of my life was traveling, and then I was here and the stories, I needed them, and they showed up.”

Yang believes there are specific reasons why she and her fellow Minnesota writers have been particularly productive lately.

“There is so much to write about”

“The murder of George Floyd and the economic situation – there is so much to write about in our world today and in the context of Minnesota, especially,” said Yang, whose four books are all inspired by her birth in a Thai refugee camp.

“We have so many refugees coming here, and there are so many wars going on around the world. Minnesota is the No. 1 state for secondary refugee resettlement (that is, refugees who originally landed in another state before moving here). And overall, we’re one of the leading states in resettlement,” Yang said, citing Minnesota’s welcoming atmosphere and social services. “As a writer who writes about refugees, there’s so much to write about in this state, so much that the rest of the world doesn’t even see.”

Since three of these four super producers are people of color, it is also worth noting that writers of color often felt like they had to work twice as hard to get half the attention as their white counterparts.

In the last decade of her career alone, Rendon says she has seen changes in the stories that publishers want to publish. During a break at a workshop for Indigenous writers, she noticed a growing acceptance of stories by marginalized writers.

“With ‘Murder on the Red River,’ there were five years of rejections before I was even published – rejections from agents, editors, publishers. And then: boom!” said Rendon, whose debut crime novel hit stores in 2017 and spawned a successful series. “I think it was a change in the industry.”

Chapman stressed that the publishing world is tough for everyone.

“I’m not going to sit here and say that people of color have to work harder in this industry. I know a lot of white writers who work very hard as well,” Chapman said. “But sometimes it feels like we’re sitting on a mountain, especially when our stories have not been welcome in the past and are still not welcome in certain spaces.”

Yang also believes that the tide is turning. In her case, it will be a flood.

“Every writer’s life has periods of flood and drought, so next year will be quieter for me,” Yang said. “And then we’ll prepare for 2026 – that’s the year I think I’ll write three books.”