Minerva Hall will celebrate the grand opening of its newly renovated and expanded facility on Thursday, June 11, at 6:30 p.m. This improvement project was launched three years ago and the open house will celebrate its completion after much hard work. The original Minerva Hall was built in 1916. Several men of the community helped to build the hall, but the main carpenters were Simbi Josephson and Mundi Narfason. Before events, it was Elli Narfason who went to the hall to light the Coleman lanterns, start a fire in the barrel stoves, and do other chores to get the hall ready. After electric lights were installed in the old hall, it was a teenaged Raymond Sigurdson who lit the fires. For years, Oli Narfason plowed the snow from the driveway and parking lot.

Katrín Níelsdóttir, Winnipeg, MB

Some people arrive at Icelandic culture by birth. Others, by inheritance. And then there are those like James Hargrove, who seem to arrive by story. Hargrove’s path to Icelandic literature did not begin in a saga, but in a laboratory. A retired biological scientist from the University of Georgia, his early career was grounded in nutrition research, computer modelling, and what he calls “anything that grows in Georgia – peanuts, pecans, muscadine grapes.” But even then, another thread was quietly forming. “I got into historical research,” he recalls, tracing one of his projects back to the origins of the nutritional calorie – an obscure detail that eventually led him into French archives from 1819. “That’s when things started to shift.”

Katrín Níelsdóttir, Winnipeg, MB    

I went into this interview knowing two things about David Jón Fuller. One: I teach his sister Icelandic. Two: at some point, he had been editor of Lögberg-Heimskringla. This is how a lot of things start in our community – through slightly confusing connections and the realization that, actually, everyone is related or has worked at the paper at some point. “Oh yeah,” he said when I mentioned it. “Once you see the Fuller and the Icelandic, there’s not that many of us.” Which is both reassuring and slightly concerning. Fuller wrote for Lögberg-Heimskringla in the 1990s while living in Iceland, later worked in layout, and eventually returned as editor from 2005 to 2007. He still speaks about the paper with a kind of fondness that suggests both pride and the lingering trauma of deadlines.