If you've seen The Saint Paul Almanac on sale in Twin Cities bookstores and coffee shops, you know that it's a datebook with a difference. A calendar/planner chock-full of local events and historical information tied to the days of the year, it's also full of photographs and stories�a welter of stories from all of the ethnic groups and ages that make up the capital city, stories about Burmese immigrants, a Ghanaian's first Minnesota winter, barging on the Mississippi at flood tide, being the only African-American in an Irish step-dance class.
   
It's a six-year-old labor of love begun by onetime book editor and teacher Kimberly Nightingale, a woman with a mission that goes well beyond providing a handy and entertaining place to record coffee dates and relatives' birthdays. Nightingale sees the book as a model for nothing less than a revolution in American publishing. And her fusion of multiethnic, history-and-culture-rich, hyperlocal storytelling is resonating in places like Los Angeles, Portland, and Pittsburgh; people in a dozen cities across the country have asked her for help in creating their own versions of the Almanac.

More than Handy
   
It's a thick paperback that lays out one week per spread. There's room to write in your to-do's for Monday or Wednesday or Sunday of course, and in the box for nearly every day there's also a bit of Saint Paul information, history, or commentary: for September 17, 2011: "Argentine Tango, Black Dog Caf�, 8 PM." For May 2: "Poetry Slam, Artists' Quarter." On July 27, there's a note about A. B. Stickney, who developed the South Saint Paul Union Stockyards and was born on that date in 1840.
   
But the most notable feature of the Almanac is the sequence of stories that interrupt and enrich the flow of weeks and months. Turn the page after the end of July and Truly Paw tells the tale of her journey from the Mae La refugee camp in Thailand to Saint Paul, by way of two vast and confusing cities, New York and Chicago. "In Saint Paul," she writes with humor and relief, "I didn't see buildings as tall as a I saw in New York."
   
At the end of November, Jeanne Pinette Souldern sings the praises of Mickey's Dining Car in downtown Saint Paul by way of an anecdote about a kindly waitress who tried to dissuade an elderly patron from getting extra butter on his toast. And in mid-March, Deb Pleasants regales readers with an account of her adventures in that step-dance class.
   
There are Saint-Paul-themed poems by established and unknown poets, essays by up-and-coming novelists, reminiscences by old-timers. As the days pass, the reader/user of the Almanac gets a richer and richer image of Saint Paul as a hub of human experience, a place where, for nearly two centuries, people from far-flung places have come together to share space and history.
  
 "We have a lot of different kinds of wealth in our cities, and one of the greatest sources of wealth I see is our stories," Nightingale says. "So much of how change happens in the world is because someone tells a story." Now more than ever, she believes, people need to know one another's narratives. "Our city's changing at a rapid pace right now, with new immigrants and new cultures," she says. "This creates surprise and trepidation for everyone, including the newcomers, but I also hear and see a lot of delight in it.

"There's a sense of 'How do we meet each other?' I often hear from Almanac readers comments like 'I didn't know that this community even existed here.' I think it helps create a sense that we're all in this together."

In Search of Stories
   
Saint-Paul born, Nightingale grew up in Tokyo and Taiwan, where her father worked for Northwest Airlines. After a stint in suburban Southern California, she returned to the Twin Cities with her husband and child in 1989. She taught at the Heart of the Earth Survival School, the now-closed Native American charter school in Dinkytown, then worked as an editor at Llewellyn, the New Age publisher in Saint Paul.
   
"Llewellyn does a lot of almanacs�moon almanacs, herbal almanacs. I was never very interested in those," she says. But the almanac idea did provide her with a way to do something very important to her: "mainstreaming" the stories of people outside the mainstream.
   
"I became aware that there were great stories from all the different ethnic and immigrant communities here," she says. "But the communities didn't share their stories with each other very often, and I certainly didn't see these stories widely distributed for everyone to read. One day I got angry about that and realized that I could do something about it."
   
She spent the next three weeks poring over publications like Poor Richard's Almanac, Benjamin Franklin's famous colonial-era compendium, and Cosmo Dogood's Urban Almanac, by Utne Reader founder Eric Utne. She realized that combining a useful planner (including lists of restaurants, coffee shops, dance venues, and other local amenities) with a galaxy of stories, essays, and poems from every element of the Saint Paul mosaic could fuse the practical and the idealistic in an invigorating way.
   
"A lot of people laughed when I floated the idea," says Nightingale. "They told me that 'the book is dead�use the web.' But I wanted the Almanac to serve everybody�even people who didn't have computers or were a little scared of them." (For the tech- friendly, the project now has a very active web site.)
   
At first, it was a one-woman enterprise. Nightingale hung out in ethnic cafes, talking to people, laying out her ideas, asking for stories. She went to literary events looking for writers. "I was creating relationships, building trust and connections with people all over the city," she says.

New Tales, New Telling

Eventually, the connections blossomed into a unique form of democratic editing in which Nightingale works with 20-plus "community editors" who help gather material. Through a system of evaluation, re-evaluation, and voting, the editors decide which stories go in. And then comes the editing itself, about which Nightingale has strong, even revolutionary opinions.
   
"You only have to go to a literary event to realize that the scene is mostly white-European," she says. "The publishing industry is mostly white-European. And the editing of books is mostly on a white-European standard." Nightingale teaches her diverse group of community editors the basics of the publishing process, but she encourages them to preserve the characteristic rhythms and word choices of the writers, even--or especially--when those writers don't or can't use standard English style.
   
The point isn't to be quaint--it's to change American publishing. "I dream of the day when every writer with a non-mainstream voice can have an editor who understands where that voice, that rhythm, comes from, and enhances it rather than homogenizes it," she says.
   
It remains to be seen whether the Almanac will spark an editing revolution, but Nightingale's enterprise is very active on the Saint Paul scene, with a reading and spoken-word-art series and a strong presence in the city's high schools. And it is certainly sparking interest nationwide. An almanac modeled on Saint Paul's was launched in Albuquerque in 2009, and Nightingale and company will hear in April whether or not they've received a National Endowment for the Arts grant that will allow them to help groups in Pittsburgh and Fresno develop almanacs. And at least ten other localities are interested, including Baltimore, Portland, New Orleans, and Los Angeles.
   
Excited as she is by the spread of the Almanac idea, Nightingale's heart remains in her hometown. "I'm in this project for the long haul," she says. "Eventually I want to see thirty years of generational stories; I want to see the grandchildren of contributors contributing stories. I want every family in Saint Paul to have a story in The Saint Paul Almanac."

Jon Spayde is Managing Editor of The Line.


Photos, top to bottom:

Nightingale and Almanac in Lowertown's Black Dog Cafe

A Community Editor makes a pitch at an Almanac editorial meeting at the A/Z Gallery in Lowertown. Standing at the back of the room is Patricia Kirkpatrick, a professor at Hamline University and editor of the Water-Stone Review, a literary magazine published by Hamline's Graduate School of Liberal Studies, Kirkpatrick gave a presentation to the group.

Nightingale makes a point in the meeting.

Democratic editing means discussion.

All photos by Bill Kelley