Honors and Awards: 2006-07

    • Spohn Award Recipients: Paul Dillon and Kristen Rau
    • AWP Discovered Voices Award (Sponsored by Iron Horse Literary Review): Josh Kalscheur ’07 – Poetry, Adam Lozeau ’08 – Fiction, Tim Rehborg ’08 – Nonfiction
    • Brett Defries ’08 has had his poem “Taking the Illinois River” accepted by the Flint Hills Review.
    • Brett Defries ’08 has published two poems “At the Waco Baptist Church” and “Litany and Braille” in the journal Ruminate.
    • Brett Defries ’08 has a poem published, “Adagio” in the MacGuffin.
    • Josh Kalscheur ’07 has two poems–“Halfway Across the Washington Ave. Bridge” and “From the Hotel to the Motherhouse” accepted by Words on the Walls.
      http://www.wordsonwalls.net/Kalscheur.html 
    • The St. Olaf College English Department is pleased to announce that the following creative works have been nominated for the Associated Writing Programs’ “Intro Journals Project” Awards:

      • “Heroes,” creative nonfiction by Joshua Kalscheur ’07
      • “The Parlane’s Leap of Faith,” fiction by Stephanie Soucheray ’07
      • “Delilah” and “The Leaving Season,” poems by Bret DeFries ’08
      • “Purgatory,” poem by Joshua Kalscheur ’07
    • Stephanie Soucheray ’07 has just accepted a position for the Northfield News as staffwriter!
    • Joshua Kalscheur ’07 has a poem entitled “Wednesday at the Mercadillo” forthcoming from The New Delta Review
    • Brett Defries ’08 has published a poem “St. Francis and the Whales of Prudhoe Bay” in Borderlands: The Texas Poetry Review.
    • Ian Anderson ’07 featured in the Star Tribune: “Ian Anderson has a hot new band, a label on the rise and a cool reviews site. All that, and college, too.”

      Ian Anderson’s a team player

      Chris Riemenschneider, Star Tribune
      Last update: September 21, 2006 – 1:37 PM

      The answering message on Ian Anderson’s cell phone mentions his office hours, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. It sounds like a wry joke, especially since he doesn’t have an office, but he means business.

      anderson“I sort of work everywhere I can,” Anderson explains, “but I try to adhere to some kind of schedule.”

      A mop-topped bespectacled hipster with a smidgen of baby fat on him, Anderson is the kind of 21-year-old who can make people in their 30s feel like failures.

      He runs his own record label, Afternoon Records, which these days releases more than one CD a month. He fronts a burgeoning new six-piece rock band, One for the Team, in addition to Aneuretical, the power trio he formed while still attending Benilde-St. Margaret High School in St. Louis Park. And he has a music website, SliverMagazine.com, which is sort of a younger answer to the already youthful PitchforkMedia.com.

      Not to mention he’s in his senior year at St. Olaf College and is editor of its newspaper.

      “I’ve never really been comfortable with downtime,” Anderson said with a laugh, after I told him how much I hate him.

      Talking Monday night at the Normal Pub before a One for the Team gig, Anderson showed all the charm and none of the cockiness you’d expect of a wunderkind.

      Instead of going on at length about One for the Team — whose Death Cab-cut CD, “Good Boys Don’t Make Noise,” is one of this year’s most raved-about local debuts–he talked up many of the other acts on his Afternoon Records. There’s the God Damn Doo Wop Band, of course, who were the one act on the label with an established following before Anderson signed them. The others, including the Squareshooters, Superdanger, the Plagiarists and Look Down, essentially got their first leg-up from Anderson.

      “I like working with young bands,” he said. “They’re a lot more eager and not at all jaded, but I also get attracted to their potential. If a band like Look Down is good at 18, imagine how good they’ll be at 25.”

      Afternoon’s latest release — “Sparkle Dust Fantasy” by boy/girl electro-punk band the Battle Royale — comes from a group of Minneapolis Southwest High students. Anderson booked their CD release show Sunday at the Triple Rock, and he’s using One for the Team’s rising name to lead some support (as openers).

      “Ian does a lot more for these bands than you can ever really expect from a small label,” said Erik Funk, Dillinger Fourguitarist and owner of the Triple Rock, where Anderson also sometimes works behind the bar.

      “He’s the busiest man in the show business,” Funk added. “He’d probably do better narrowing, focusing a little bit on the things he does best, but the truth is he really does pull most of it off.”

      Anderson and some friends dreamt up Afternoon Records while waiting in line for a Cursive CD-release show in 2003 in Omaha (home to indie label extraordinaire Saddle Creek).

      “We were telling the other kids about our bands, and they were like, ‘Do you have a label? What’s it called?'” he recounted.

      The name was thought up on the spot, taken from a Les Savy Fav song, and the first release by the short-lived Genepickscame out a few months later.

      Selling 500 copies of a CD was a big thing at first, but many of Afternoon’s releases have gone up to a couple thousand over the past year, Anderson said. He credits online connections such as MySpace.com and the fact that the bands can tour (easier to do once you graduate from high school). One for the Team even earned a blurb when it played in New York from the Village Voice, which faintly praised their “squecky-clean indie-rock.” “I’ll take anything,” Anderson said, “so long as I can tell my mom I got written up in the Village Voice.”

      Mom also seems to be the primary reason Anderson is taking his studies at St. Olaf seriously. But he doesn’t dismiss the idea of balancing a real job — probably as an English teacher — with running the label and playing in his bands.

      “I think I could pull it off,” he said.

      Would anybody really doubt him?

      Chris Riemenschneider