Zandbroz Variety
420 Broadway, Fargo, ND 58102
Store Hours
Monday-Saturday
10 a.m - 6.pm
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which revered poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature. Emphasizing the significance of her childhood “friend” Walt Whitman, through whose work she first understood that a poem is a temple, “a place to enter, and in which to feel,” and who encouraged her to vanish into the world of her writing, Oliver meditates on the forces that allowed her to create a life for herself out of work and love. As she writes, “I could not be a poet without the natural world. Someone else could. But not me. For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.”
Upstream follows Oliver as she contemplates the pleasure of artistic labor, her boundless curiosity for the flora and fauna that surround her, and the responsibility she has inherited from Shelley, Wordsworth, Emerson, Poe, and Frost, the great thinkers and writers of the past, to live thoughtfully, intelligently, and to observe with passion. Throughout this collection, Oliver positions not just herself upstream but us as well as she encourages us all to keep moving, to lose ourselves in the awe of the unknown, and to give power and time to the creative and whimsical urges that live within us.
Zandbroz Variety
Since 1989
About Us
ZANDBROZ VARIETY
Since 1989
In 1988, Jeff and Greg Danz had a dream. They would open a store that they would want to shop. So they bought an empty turn of the century building in the heart of downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The brothers spent a year restoring the building and developing the concept for what would become Zandbroz Variety. When the doors opened in May of 1989, Zandbroz was a bookstore with an eclectic mix of other inventory, an old fashioned soda fountain and coffee bar. The store was a hit and a couple of years later a second location was opened in Fargo, ND. Zandbroz Variety started in a world before Barnes and Noble, Starbucks and internet shopping were part of the landscape. That of course all changed and so too Zandbroz has evolved and changed –THIRTY years later and we are still here!
Store Hours
Monday-Saturday
10 a.m - 6.pm