The hills are dead to Minnesota’s foremost troll expert
[excerpt]
MinnPost: Are you really Minnesota’s foremost troll expert?
LISE LUNGE-LARSEN: Yuh-huh! Yep. I am. They say just should follow your passion or passion pursues you in life. When I was younger, I came over here on this scholarship and I had the idea I should be an academic. I taught ESL at St Catherine’s and got my master’s, but the trolls were always in pursuit of me. So I became a storyteller. When I tell stories, it seems like it’s always the troll stories that come out and want to be told. I can’t escape my fate.
MP: Why is the troll book coming back into print now?
LL-L: The original publisher, Houghton-Mifflin, was just going to issue it as a Kindle edition and let the book go away. But the University of Minnesota Press thought that it deserved to be in print because it’s a part of Minnesota’s Scandinavian heritage, with all the Norwegians, Swedes, Danes and Finns here. And folk stories never go out of style.
By: Amy Goetzman
Story Date: 2013-07-22T00:00:00