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Celebrating 50 years in 2024, the Loft Literary Center advances the power of writers and readers to craft and share stories, to create and celebrate connections, and to build just, life-sustaining communities.

By Arleta Little MSW’01, from the

“I AM BECAUSE WE ARE.” (Ubuntu)

In the nearly 30 years that I have called Minnesota my home, I have learned that the connections that generate an experience of community don’t occur because we inhabit a space. Community, a sense of belonging, occurs when where we are reflects, affirms, and supports who we are. This quality of community is crafted. 

• The Seed Keeper: A Novel by Diane Wilson (2021)
• You Are Life by Bao Phi (Hannah Li, Illus.) (2022)

As a writer and culture worker, I have always gravitated to creatives, people showing up not as passive recipients to partake but as generative participants to produce, making and remaking our understanding of ourselves and revising our experiences of place and relationships with each other.

• Culturemaking by Houston White, Jr. (2023)
• Where We Come From by Sun Yung Shin, Shannon Gibney, Diane Wilson, and John Coy (2023)
• A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, ed. Erin Sharkey (2023)

Notably, in the midst of the many strong winds of distraction, we must work to belong to ourselves, to attain and maintain clarity of identity and purpose. We also belong to each other in an inevitable interconnectedness. I understand this interrelationship in the concept of Ubuntu which often translates as “I am because we are.” Discovering, embodying, and expressing who we are is a primary enterprise of life, individually and collectively.

• Looking For Happy by Ty Chapman (Keenon Ferrell, Illus.) (2023)
• Lost and Found: A Memoir of Mothers by Kate St. Vincent Vogl (2020)

When we choose to participate in this ongoing emergence, this abiding spring, this call and response of home that we shape and by which we are shaped; as we give voice to stories and songs; as we are imprinted by seasons; as we engage and come together in ritual celebrations; as we embody and recall ancestral wisdom; as we imagine, articulate, and generate novel ways of being; as we organize and build businesses and institutions; as we nurture and prepare the next generation… We craft community.

• New Poets of Native Nations, ed. Heid E. Erdrich (2018)
• My City Was a Sparkling Jewel: Voices of Newcomer Youth from Afghanistan, eds. Tea Rozman, Zahra Lotfi, and Jeannine Erickson (2023)