Think 1935. The country is in the midst of the Great Depression. The gross national product is falling as businesses fail daily. One of every three persons is thrown out of work. Millions of Americans desperately look for their next meal. Bread lines are everywhere, along with shantytowns called Hoovervilles. Thousands of homeless people sleep in public parks, city subway stations, and doorways. Suicide rates climb alarmingly each month. Anxiety permeates the American psyche. The government of Franklin Roosevelt is worried not only about how to finance massive relief rolls but also about a possible nationwide revolution fueled by empty bellies and hungry egos.

Among the early steps to stave off the collapse of the country, Harold L. Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, formed and established the Public Works Administration to plan, fund, and administer the enormous amount of work needed to revitalize the country. To accomplish this gargantuan task, the PWA needed people to do the jobs they had created, and the relief rolls were full of them.

So began the Works Project Administration. The WPA was supposed to take able-bodied people off the relief rolls by putting them to work for subsistence pay at “small useful projects designed to assure a maximum of employment in all localities.” Vacated places on the relief rolls could then be filled by even more citizens who were on an endless waiting list.

The phrase “projects that benefit the nation,” from the Emergency Relief Act, was freely interpreted by Harry Hopkins, the WPA Director. He defined his task as putting as many people to work as possible, raising the level of work skills in the nation and increasing the circulating money supply so that the economy in general would expand. Thousands of young men were hired by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) to build trails and campsites in our national parks. One million able-bodied men, heads of households, were hired in their communities to build schools, hospitals, and roads at the nations expense. But still there was a gigantic pool of workers who were not as capable of hard physical labor. Many of these were hired as managers, typists, and clerks for the growing local WPA administration offices, but still the relief rolls were overburdened.

So arts projects came into being, and so did the Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop. First came to Minnesota Writers’ Project, instituted to write and produce a guidebook to the state, just as each of the other 48 states were doing. Ordered to hire 120 writers from the state relief rolls, the state Director could only locate one published writer—Meridel Lesueur—along with one poet and two reporters thrown out of work when their newspaper closed. The rest of the state project was staffed with people whose connection to the written word was tenuous; a typist from the newspaper, an English teacher, a classified ads seller. Over 50 recently graduated unemployed English majors were hired to fill out the staff.

At the same time, state WPA Director Hubert Humphrey was starting an educational project where he hired unemployed teachers to teach free after-hours classes in empty schools and libraries. The object of these classes was obviously to employ the teachers, but was also to train the unemployable for earning money. Besides the usual classes such as typing and shorthand, Humphrey approved two classes in “Writing to Sell,” suggested by the director of the Writers’ Project. Many of the college graduates from the Writers’ Project, impressed by a $200 prize Meridel Lesueur won in a writing contest, enrolled in the classes.

The classes were taught at the main public library in downtown Minneapolis, at Hennepin and 10th St. The first two teachers were Milo Oblinger and Mabel Oren. Shortly after the classes began, some of the students asked to organize one of the classes into a workshop format. It is the workshop, moderated and also taught by Milo Oblinger, that survives as our Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop of today. Some of the people in that first workshop were Mary Nolan, Winifred Robinson, Hellen Connelly, Laura Baker, Curtis Erickson, Roland Angval, Annette Turngren, and her sister Ellen Turngren.

Federal funding for most of the arts project was discontinued beginning in 1939 as World War II approached. At that time Max Winter, owner of the well-known 620 Club on Hennepin, invited the MWW to meet in his establishment on a regular rent-free basis. They accepted and agreed everyone would pay a nickel at each meeting for Oblinger’s efforts. The Workshop met at the 620 Club every Wednesday at 8 pm for the next 28 years. By that time the membership roster included Harold Sandberg, Neil Messick (owner of the former Nicollet Hotel), Rae Oetting Helgeson, Marguerite McClain, Mabel Robinson, and Clifford Simak, a nationally-known sci-fi writer. Other members who soon joined were Robert Lyle Sr. of the Minneapolis Tribune, Evelyn Bergman, Josephine Byrne, Annalee Wolff, Dan Brennan, Edythe Warner, and Benedict Harman, head of the English Department at the College of St. Catherine.

Beginning in 1954, the group began a 20 year association with a writing program at the state prison in Stillwater. Called “The Inkweavers,” this educational program met monthly at the prison to spend an evening working with ambitious prisoners on their manuscripts. Two of the prisoners became published authors—Frank Elli, whose novel “The Riot” was made into a movie, and E. Richard Johnson, who eventually published nine mystery books.

During this same period, the Minneapolis Vocational Night School called on MWW for teachers to conduct their writing class. Called “Writing for Profit,” the class was taught by Mabel Robinson, Rae Oetting Helgeson, Marilyn Granbeck, Mary Montgomery, and Grace Riger, as well as others.

In 1970, The University of Wisconsin at River Falls started a summer Writers’ Conference and they turned to the MWW talent for workshop leaders. Herb Montgomery was one of those involved, along with Marilyn Granbeck, Phyllis Figge Pantell, and Sharon Longfellow Meko.

By 1971, members of the MWW had about 400 books published, plus thousands of articles, stories, poems, etc. Since then it has been difficult to keep accurate track of the printed output.

In 1972, the group officially incorporated under the name Minneapolis Writers’ Workshop Inc., and moved their meetings to the Minnesota Press Club. After about ten years and several locations the Workshop moved to the Regency Plaza Hotel. About that same time, the Minneapolis Public Library began gathering material on the organization for their Minneapolis History Collection. Long-time member Mary Wilensky gathered material, sorted it, and wrote brief biographies for an album of pictures that is deposited at the library.

Unfortunately, the archives do not reflect the extraordinary range of personalities that populate the MWW. You have to read the small print and parenthetical phrases of an obituary to discover that Neil Lomax wrote all his short stories on a Linotype machine, setting each story in lead slugs for the print machine before he could read them. Or that our first writers’ conference was a three-day event held in 1985 at St. John’s University. Or that LOOK magazine once did a two-page spread on the MWW. Or that the original manuscripts and illustrations of at least nine MWW members are contained in the Kerlan Collection of Children’s Books at the University of Minnesota.

The Minneapolis Writers Workshop’s most recent physical location was at the Black Forest Inn. During the CoVid-19 pandemic of 2020-21, a virtual “Zoom” room was organized and attracted a whole new group of talented writers.

Manuscripts are still read and critiqued. Ideas for improvement and marketing of works-in-progress are exchanged. Through all the years, and still today, the weekly meetings have been a source of learning, inspiration, and encouragement to writers who mostly work in solitude.

The MWW is a place of regular contact with people who share the same interests, problems and hopes. It is one of the oldest (if not THE oldest) persistent, continuous writers’ workshops in the nation—a testament to the extraordinary range of member talent and diversity. There is one common goal that drives us: “Writing to Sell.”

RxP ’01

Revised MeB 2021