Jessie Hennen

Near the end of 2021, I went to an open mic at the Bluenose Gopher, a taproom in downtown Granite Falls. I’d been performing sketch comedy there for the last two months as my alter ego Jessica Feeler, a bizarro-world gender-neutral version of Garrison Keillor, but now I was going to switch gears and… something…

I liked tutoring, but damn did I hate our company’s old office in St. Louis Park. After a warren of gray-carpeted hallways and mysterious closed doors, you reached one long fluorescent room with tables and folding chairs; we didn’t really share schedules, so every day, I’d walk in unsure how many other people would be…

Last night, I was fortunate to attend the opening reception for a local emerging artist, Dacian Cavender-DeMuth (also known as Sungcinca), at the K.K. Berge Gallery in downtown Granite Falls.* I was impressed by Cavender-DeMuth’s relative lack of formal artistic training; he has studied at the Montessori school in Montevideo for only a few years,…

There are books one reads as a child and then, as an adult, forgets — or not quite forgets, but fails to remember. They become as internalized as a dream. They are memories, but stolen memories; when a child reads, after all, she becomes the characters, takes their actions as her own. I think my…

I’ve had this monster of a blog post queued up on my site for a while, glaring at me from my Drafts folder. If you’re reading this the day I posted it, it’s March 12th: the one-year anniversary of Shit Getting Real! You, citizen of the world, know what I mean. If you live in…

After months of applying and being either ghosted or told that the creature in question was alas unavailable, we finally succeeded in setting up a meeting with one. In early January, we drove twenty minutes to Marshall, nervous the whole way. Grinning, sure, but behind our grins was the sentence – what the hell are…

We’ve been out here on the farm for nigh on three months now. As I’ve previously written, time passes strangely here; due to the fact that we’ve put a temporary kibosh on visitors (b/c holy cow, will you look at that covid spike??), one day is much like the next. This was one of my…

You wanted a dog, but instead, you have four cats. Friends joke that you could tape them together into a dog, if you liked. They’d be about the size of the one you want – a midsize pup who doesn’t shed, or not so much, and who likes to lean on your leg while you…

Time passes differently here on the farm. Sometimes I have dreams where we still properly live in Minneapolis, where the duplex is still full of its furniture, and sometimes I’m convinced that we’ve lived here forever, that we’re in fact haunting it, Beetlejuice-style. We have, in fact, been here for three weeks, which semi-shocks me.…

As a child, I remember saying faux-modestly to people on the playground, “My grandmother writes the Morrison County Record’s recipe column. You know, Vangie Gwost?” No one had, of course, heard of her, a) because we were children and b) because we lived quite far from Morrison County, but still I persevered. To me, my…