Photos by Caitlin Abrams
Anne Ursu reading on a park bench
Anne Ursu and her enduring magic (and her seven middle grade fantasy reads)
Once upon a time in a Minneapolis winter, it snowed and all the neighborhood kids headed out with their sleds. Yes, this happens today, but it happened once upon a time, too.
When much-awarded kid-lit author Anne Ursu was one of those Minneapolis neighborhood kids, she took her sled and headed to the particular bowl ringed with hills that everyone in Kenwood knows. It’s just north of Lake of the Isles, right past the tennis courts, above the summer softball fields, where the big hill is crowned by native oaks and at least one pine tree where an owl lives (you know from the mouse bones scattered below). A sledding hill that at the top shows downtown skyscrapers—just the tops of them, like they’re floating. A sledding hill that, when you slide down, lands you in a bowl of snow so high-sided you see nothing but snow and trees and other kids on sleds—so far from any landmark or anchor besides the crystal drift that you may as well be in Narnia.
Many, many children of Minneapolis have had this experience on this exact sledding hill. Thousands? Tens of thousands? But only Anne Ursu pursued the thought: What if the woods at the top of the Kenwood sledding hill really were enchanted? And what if a neighborhood girl whose parents had just separated had to go into those woods to save her best friend? Only Ursu wrote Breadcrumbs—and only Ursu has had her version of the Minneapolis Kenwood sledding hill magic stocked in libraries coast to coast and translated into Chinese, Thai, French, and German.
“It’s just a really good sledding hill,” Ursu tells me when I meet her at Gigi’s Cafe Wyrd, the south Minneapolis coffee shop on 36th Street. Ursu has bright eyes and long curly hair and is frequently seen at Gigi’s, for that’s where she’s written significant chunks of all her books of the last decade, including her newest, out this month, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy. “I’d drop off my son, come here, order breakfast; if things went well, order lunch,” she explains.
It’s a hot late summer day, and we complain as Minnesotans will about how we both prefer snow to heat. But Ursu has a different reason than mere beauty, mere comfort. “An editor came to Hamline, where I teach, and said, ‘I love to come to Minnesota in January. I think magic is closer to the surface in the snow,’” Ursu recalls. “And I thought, That’s right. It is. Snow to me means home. It was hard to live anywhere without snow. It’s real-life magic. It’s home.”
Ursu knows magic. She’s world-famous in magic, dragons, potions, talking crows, enchanted wolves, and everything that life really ought to have more of thanks to her heavy-hitter string of children’s books. These include her big best sellers Breadcrumbs (Minneapolis girl saves best friend from the white witch), The Lost Girl (enmeshed identical twins must redefine their identities in the fifth grade while defeating a magician who is stealing the world’s art treasures, including the Walker Art Center’s Spoonbridge and Cherry), and National Book Award nominee The Real Boy (a tale of a boy so awkward he suspects he’s really a wooden puppet and the magical shenanigans he overcomes). All of these are what are known as “middle grade” books in the book business—that is, books in the general size and shape of those in the Harry Potter series—big, rich chapter books about child heroes but without the sex and violence found in what are known as “young adult” books, like the Twilight series. Ursu’s new book, her seventh middle grade fantasy for kids, The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, is the most Potter-esque of all. It takes place at a school in a castle-like estate, and there are wizards—but it’s actually much more like Ursu’s other books, which we’ll return to in a moment, than it is like Hogwarts.
Writer Anne Ursu in the woods
Writer Anne Ursu finds enchantments in woods that others may miss.
For now, let’s consider how very Minneapolis Ursu is, because it is nice to notice when a daughter of the neighborhood does good. Ursu grew up across from Lake of the Isles. She had a spaniel named Big Red who liked to escape and go swimming in the muck and return stinking. She’d trail her big brother and his pack around the neighborhood on bikes: They had a particular tree they’d use as a catcher, and they bought candy in the store that now houses Birchbark Books. Her dad worked at 3M, and her mom was in school to be a psychologist.
Nearly every Saturday morning, young Anne went with her mom to the Walker Library in Uptown—the old one, when it was in the big building with the pillars across from the current Walker Library, as well as the one that sat underground at the current site—and while her mom studied, young Anne would wander the stacks, plucking out a load to take home.
“My mom said I’d come home with a stack of books, disappear into my room, and come out Monday with them all read,” she says. “That’s part of why I write for kids now, the way I just inhaled books at that age, middle grade books. They meant so much to me. I remember saying, in sixth grade or so, ‘When I grow up, I want to write books like this.’ My mom said, ‘You say that because these are the books you’re reading now. When you grow up, you’ll probably want to read and write other types of books.’ Nope! Turns out I was right.” She particularly remembers loving the books of Maud Hart Lovelace, who also lived within walking distance of the old Walker Library and later filled some of its shelves with her girl-adventure Betsy-Tacy books.
Ursu continued a very recognizable southwest Minneapolis girlhood—Lake Country for grade school, Blake after; birthday cakes from the Lincoln Del; a run in a locally touring theater company as a child actor playing Charles Wallace in a production of Madeleine L’Engle’s anti-conformist A Wrinkle in Time series.
“Seventy-two performances later, I had absolutely inhaled and integrated the structure,” she recalls. “Because I write fantasy, everyone always asks about Lord of the Rings, but my best friend who lived around the block read them all when I was in second grade, and I couldn’t get through them. Only later did I realize my friend was just a genius. I did read my dad’s copies of fairy tales, including Grimms’ and Hans Christian Andersen and the Greek myths, all the time. I mean, I read them over and over, over and over. They’re part of my literary DNA. And I definitely watched Star Wars at least 100,000 times with my brother!”
Well-saturated with Star Wars, fairy tales, A Wrinkle in Time, and memories of sledding, Ursu headed east to Brown University. She returned four years later after completing her bachelor’s degree—but also having been leveled by an autoimmune disease that rendered her periodically spinning-dizzy and flat-out exhausted. “It changes things,” she notes. “I was very driven growing up, but all of that sort of goes away when you don’t know if you’re going to be able to function from one day to the next.”
Still, she started an internship at City Pages and worked as the theater critic for a year before deciding her health wouldn’t let her make those commitments. “It sounds counterintuitive, but being sick, I could only rely on myself—writing is a really good career path for that. And one of the things that happens in fantasy is that things come out of the air and happen to you out of nowhere, and everything changes. Which is a lot like illness. I have wondered if that’s part of why I’m so drawn to fantasy—it feels realistic to my life.”
Ursu wrote two novels for adults, each with magical elements; married a graduate student; moved to Maine, California, Massachusetts, Ohio; and then returned to Minneapolis again, divorced with a 3-year-old son. “All I wanted was to rent an apartment in Linden Hills so I could be near Wild Rumpus and take my son there as much as we wanted.” And so she did. Today Ursu has a house that’s walking distance from Wild Rumpus, teaches in the low-residency MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults program at Hamline, and actively resists all compliments and flattery.
She’s only the third most important children’s fantasy writer in town, she insists, after Newbery winners Kate DiCamillo, a national treasure, and Kelly Barnhill. (“I don’t know how Anne does it,” says Barnhill. “Her books have eyes and teeth and beating hearts.”) No, no, says Ursu. “Only two Newberys for fantasy writing have been awarded in the last 20 years, and they both went to Minneapolis writers who were not me. Kate and Kelly are amazing. Amazing.” Also, insists Ursu, pay no attention to the fact that Drew Barrymore optioned The Lost Girl for a TV show; these things never go anywhere. Also, probably best to not mention that Dragomir was awarded the prestigious Kirkus Star—prepublication—which tells librarians, Pay attention; this one is really good.
It is. In The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy, Ursu continues her signature style of layering a story of brave children forced into adventure and daring feats upon a deft consideration of the biggest philosophical and moral problems at the core of human existence. Dragomir stars young Marya, resident of a kingdom where a certain number of boys every year manifest magic and then are elevated to great wealth and power. Marya, high-spirited and a great disappointment to her mother, finds affection with another family that she babysits for and learns to weave from them. The mother of that family introduces her to concepts like text and subtext and teaches her to examine stories for who they serve as well as what they say. When Marya is suddenly summoned to a mountain school where problem girls are reeducated (and sometimes disappear), that skill for disentangling stories and motives comes in handy.
“I remember tweeting during the Kavanaugh hearings something like, ‘My next book is going to be just a lot of girls running around and lighting fires for 150 pages,’” laughs Ursu as we sit at Gigi’s. “This isn’t that, but it’s basically the feeling of that. I needed to deal with the Kavanaugh hearings somehow, and I was bingeing Project Runway when I thought I heard the phrase the headmaster’s monster. It clearly wasn’t actually a phrase in the show, but it came to me and sparked something in my head that became the story of a kingdom where men are super-valued for having magic, and women aren’t.”
The new book stands proudly beside Ursu’s other works, which always blend page-turning kid adventure with adult moral philosophy. The Real Boy, for instance, is the story of an awkward boy, the monsters he battles, and the world he saves, but it’s also about what a society loses when it banishes neurodivergence and the sick. The Lost Girl may be about identical twins living in Linden Hills who save the world from a hoarding magic art thief, but it’s also about relational identity as a pillar of personality, for good and ill.
What’s a nice daughter of Kenwood doing smuggling kids the biggest ideas in the world? I ask Ursu this as I am wrapping up my interview.
“That’s what’s so great about children’s literature,” she explains. “Because no one is paying attention, because the adult world doesn’t take it seriously, it has the power to be very subversive. That’s a power and a privilege. It’s also an opportunity to reinforce things that are harmful, so you have to be careful. My memory of being a kid was so much of being confused by everything, of things happening and not understanding them, of processing them later and wishing I’d had words and frameworks. That’s what children’s books can do—put big things into words and give kids frameworks for understanding, whether it’s an interaction at school or a trash fire in the country.”
With that, Ursu returns to her life being a Minneapolis mom writing in coffee shops, teaching other writers, and now and then spying her dad out her window because he’s dropped by to help with the garden. “I love being near my family,” she says. “My family and Wild Rumpus and Red Balloon, the community of writers, snow, ice—the magic of Minneapolis is up at the surface for me.”
