“I began as a child fibber but soon discovered that I was less interested in telling lies than I was in improving the truth.”

Loren Niemi has spent over forty years as an innovative storyteller, creating, coaching/directing, performing and teaching stories about what matters to audiences of all ages in urban and rural settings. Loren tells the life he lives with immediacy, poetry and insight.

Loren is the author of the Moonfire Publishing 2019 release What Haunts Us, an evocative compendium of tales he has performed on many stages, along with new explorations of mysteries which arise at the intersection of the ordinary, flicker in the imagination, and dwell in memory.

The book is a collection of fifteen short stories that speak from the page in the voice of the storyteller - at turns comical, unsettling, heartbreaking and wondrous - evoking the full range of human behavior and emotion. From tales set in the northern Minnesota Boundary Waters, to the millennia-spanning landscapes of Europe and the United States, these are stories brimming with a dynamic sense of place and person, imbued with a sense of grounded reality.

Loren has told contemporary personal, traditional and ghost stories on stages in theaters, cabarets, festivals, churches, schools, and on the platforms of Minneapolis' Light Rail line where commuters can watch him as part of a public art instillation. He has performed on the Great Wall of China, been the Humanities Scholar in Residence for Northern Minnesota, worked with Catholics and Protestants in Belfast, Northern Ireland to tell the stories of "the Troubles” and appeared the stages of Fringe Festivals across the country. His work has been called “post-modern, “…with the dark beauty of language that is not ashamed of poetry.”