Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe.

But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both.

This week, we took a look back at some conversations with notable Minnesota authors, including Shannon Gibney, who just won her third Minnesota Book Award, Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang and not-ashamed-to-be-a-mystery-writer William Kent Krueger.

Jamie Figueroa’s new memoir, “Mother Island” is stylistically unique. She combines prose and creative nonfiction, myth and short stories to explore her memories.

But the heart of the book — her push-pull relationship with her mother and her process of uncovering a true self — is as old as time.

Figueroa’s mother was taken from Puerto Rico as a young child and raised in a New York City orphanage, separated from her native language, culture and ancestry. As many immigrants before her, she learned to keep her heritage distant, as a way to assimilate into a new country.

But Figueroa chafed at the disconnect — “my mother did not know how to define herself on her own terms” — and set out to remember.

As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, “[My mother] was concerned about how we were seen. She wanted to be included. Anything she could do to get closer to ‘white identity’ made it easier for her.”

“As a daughter, I respect those were the choices she was forced to make — and I feel like my life is lived in opposition to that.”

Guest:

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• Jamie Figueroa is the author of the acclaimed novel, “Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer.” Her new book is “Mother Island.”

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Alexandra Fuller’s new memoir begins with the death of her 21-year-old son, Fi, and chronicles her attempts to grieve well in the searing aftermath of his loss.

Among other things, that meant acknowledging her kinship with others who had gone before her.

In her gorgeous new book, “Fi: A Memoir of My Son,” she writes: “The way a pilot sees wind and clouds, or a sailor reads currents and water, I look unconsciously for stories to remind me where I am, to remind me that, whatever I’m going through, millions have been here before, are here now, will be here again.”

She talks about finding solace in that continuity on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. As she tells host Kerri Miller: “As I was running to my son’s body … I knew that I would be ‘over the grief’ when I was able to find gratitude for the grief. I knew I would find out the quality of my God, for real. And I knew I had joined the vast throng of women who had raised me on the Southern African continent who had been here before.”

Don’t miss this thoughtful, tender and vulnerable conversation about non-linear grief — grief that is “a braid and a spiral and a knot.”

Guest:

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• Alexandra Fuller is the author of many books, including “Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight,” and "Quiet Until the Thaw.” Her new memoir is “Fi: A Memoir of My Son.”

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Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.