Rain Taxi Review, edited by Eric Lorberer, was 25 years old in 2020, but the pandemic shut down celebrations. So the Minneapolis-based, nonprofit literary journal is throwing a belated silver anniversary party at 7 p.m. Wednesday, May 10, at Granada Theater, 3022 Hennepin Ave., Mpls.

“We’ve got a good cast for the celebration and we’re delighted to have a sort-of old-fashioned, in-person night of words and music, almost a variety show, in a beautiful theater. It will be a panoramic look at a lot of exciting things happening in our Twin Cities,” Lorberer said Monday in a phone conversation.

Among the cast will be musicians Colin Bracewell, Dosh, Adam and Ava Levy, Allie McIntosh and Mason-Hicks Party Supplies. Writers taking the stage include Michael Bazzett, Michael Kleber-Diggs, Tish Jones, Mary Lucia, Benjamin Percy and Sun Yung Shin.

When we talked with Lorberer he was sorting “passports” from people who visited all 23 bookstores on Independent Bookstore Day in April. Rain Taxi sponsors the passport program, which leads to prizes. But that’s just one of this quarterly publication’s events. Rain Taxi also publishes an online events calendar and chapbooks, and is best known for its annual Twin Cities Book Festival at the Minnesota State Fairgrounds.

We asked Lorberer what “literary journal” means.

“There are many different kinds, but generally it’s any regular publication that comes out with established frequency that focuses on some aspects of literary publishing, such as original fiction and poetry, especially reviews of books that often don’t get in the spotlight,” Lorberer says. “The great thing about thousands of kinds of journals is that each is a little snapshot of their own interests. Put them all together and it’s an illustration of how great the state of literature is in our country.”

In Rain Taxi’s spring edition there are interviews with Christine Sneed, who experiments with genre, form, style and voice, and Jack Kopp, whose new book “Happiness” combines speculative examination of existence with real-life reportage. There are essays about Russell Banks and James Weldon Johnson, as well as reviews of fiction, nonfiction/art, poetry and comics.

“Time has flown by in 28 years,” Lorberer said, talking about changes in publishing during Rain Taxi’s life.

“In some ways we are glad to see positive changes, with much greater diversity in books and authors that relates to genres and forms. When we started it was a radical act to review graphic novels. Now it’s common. This is a great thing because the culture is more open. What underlies everything Rain Taxi does is giving more access to literature, (making it) more open, less pigeon-holed. People have convictions about especially challenging fiction, that it’s only for scholars, or that you have to be an academic to study poetry. We think poetry is for everyone.”

Another part of Rain Taxi’s vision is championing print books. “We take every advantage we can of digital resources but we don’t want print to go away. It is an artistic medium,” Lorberer said. He’s also committed to encouraging the art of literary criticism by developing new and younger voices.

Lorber, 57, grew up in northern New Jersey, outside New York City. After graduate school at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he headed for the Twin Cities in the early 1990s because he heard it was a great place to live. Through “dumb luck’ he found Rain Taxi, joined the board of directors, and eventually took the reins.

“When I got here I found a vibrant arts culture,” he recalls. “I think that, like many small presses and small nonprofits, we perceived a need for this kind of publication that could do something that wasn’t being done in a substantial way in the country. We are based here but are a national publication and so we benefited from authors all around the country being excited about what we were doing and supporting us either with advice or donations.” (Rain Taxi is a membership publication at $25 per year, which includes home delivery.)

Like all publications dealing with reviews, Ran Taxi is overwhelmed with submissions. Lorberer welcomes this trend for people to express themselves in writing and he’s happy our culture has embraced this art form. But he acknowledges this means even more work to select and edit pieces for publication.

“None of us (who review) can keep up with the volume,” he admits. “We hope to continue using resources we have to bring others into the big tent of literature.”

Tickets for Wednesday’s celebration are $25 a person. Go to raintaxi.org.

“GRAVEYARD OF LOST CHILDREN” >> by Katrina Monroe (Poisoned Pen Press, $16.99)

The woman hovered over the bed, practically horizontal, black-dirty toes grazing the mattress. Her hair fell in a curtain, covering her face, covering you. Under the mud and peat, her clothes looked eerily familiar. It took too long to realize they were mine. And when she finally turned to face me — each movement so slow it seemed to last a million years — with black eyes and yellow, rotten teeth, it was my face she wore. My smile that split it. — From “Graveyard of Lost Children”

There is an old well where voices call from the depths. A woman with long black hair and black eyes. A baby who is draining her mother’s life through constant nursing.

Minnesotan Katrina Monroe wrote about mothers and daughters in danger in her previous novel “They Drown Our Daughters.” She explores frightening experiences brought on by postpartum psychosis in her new book, “Graveyard of Lost Children.”

When Olivia was a baby, her mother, Shanno,n tried to drown her in an old well. Olivia was found unharmed, but her mother was sent to the Sleepy Eye State hospital. The novel alternates chapters between mother and daughter.

Shannon, who is in the hospital for years, recalls she had haunting visions when she tried to kill Olivia, becoming obsessed with the idea the baby is a changeling and she had to make a deal with the “dead women” living at the bottom of the well to get Olivia back.

Now Olivia, married to college professor Kris, gives birth to Flora and she doesn’t bond with the baby. Flora nurses so hard she causes her mother real pain and she eats constantly. All Olivia can do is lie in bed losing a little more of herself every day. She has visions, too, of a frightening woman who reaches out to Flora. Is history repeating itself and can Olivia break the chain?

Water represents evil is this novel and in “They Drown Our Daughters,” which Monroe considers her debut because it was her first from a well-known publisher. That story involved ghostly women calling from the ocean. In “Graveyard of Lost Children” the cold, dirty water is at the bottom of the well.

Monroe isn’t concerned about how to describe her genre-jumping novels, which could be considered women’s fiction, mystery, horror, or explorations of the mental crises childbirth can cause mothers.

“From the time I’ve been writing I never thought of where my books would be shelved,” she said. “I worked from the direction of ‘this is the story I wanted to tell and this is the way I tell it.’ When an editor at Poisoned Pen suggested I was writing horror, I saw that I had been writing horror stories forever and never realized it for what it is.”

Monroe likes to think of her books as gateways into horror, but not the Stephen King kind.

“Horror can be very deeply eerie,” she says. “It doesn’t have to be all death and blood. And because there is mystery at the heart of it, predicated on women and their actions, it’s very much women’s fiction. So it’s a fence-sitter’s genre. That’s what makes it good. I’ve always loved books that are hard to categorize.”

Monroe, who grew up in Florida’s Tampa Bay area, has sympathy for single mothers who populate her fiction because she was sort of one herself.

“I was the oldest of six children and always had a motherly role,” she recalled. “I grew up with an absent mother and although I was not a single parent I had to act as one. My biological father was not the most present person. I tried to go to school and work, and all this time I was upset by it. I had to take my sister to gymnastics, buy dinner”

Monroe graduated from high school a year early and enrolled at the University of Tampa where she got kicked out because “I wasn’t ready for adult responsibility.”

She hadn’t come out as gay to her family at this point. After a relationship with the man who fathered her son Dillan and daughter Abby, she officially came out. “I had to be myself,” she says.

Monroe and her wife, Crystal Saete, were married in 2016 and live with her kids in northeast Minneapolis.

Like many authors, Monroe writes at night. During the day she’s a private investigator, although she doesn’t involve herself in cloak-and-dagger stuff. Most of her clients are in finance, people looking to buy companies, and real estate investors.

She will introduce “Graveyard of Lost Children” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, May 9, at Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Ave. S., Mpls., in conversation with Minnesotan Mindy Mejia, whose books include “The Dragon Keeper,” “Leave No Trace” and the forthcoming “to Catch a Storm.”