About Dakota & Co.

Dakota

My name is Dakota Van Linden and I am the creator, host, and sadly the editor of UpperPen Podcast. I graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing in 2019 from Minnesota State University, Mankato, and worked toward (but have since abandoned) a second Masters from MNSU in Anthropology .

Everything comes back to stories for me.

Part of why I wanted to create this podcast is because when I first started my MFA at MNSU, I was very intimidated by the authors that would come to visit for our Good Thunder reading series. Eventually, I learned they were people, just like me, who were (most of the time) very happy to speak with young writers. This ended up making me feel like not only could I be a “real” writer, but I didn’t have to be afraid as I tried.

The idea behind UpperPen is to make people in the book world accessible to people who haven’t had the chance to meet them in person.

D’Argo is the head of our military science fiction department. He really loves to sink his teeth into a good military sci-fi and feel the well-oiled machines at work. Currently, his favorites are The Undying Mercenaries series by B. V. Larson and The Palladium Wars series by Marko Kloos. He is always ready for new paw-fect books!

As a true squirrel hunter, he knows bad military tactics when he reads them. Sometimes he fails to tell Dakota which are “bad tactics”, so she has to muddle through.

Moya is the fantasy guru of this operation. She is devoted to Lit RPG and fantasy. She takes this role a little too seriously however and has started to try and perform her own dark magic. It comes out wrong and smelly. No matter how much Dakota discourages her, the she-beast is determined to become the next top Mage in the Upper Peninsula (we haven’t had the heart to tell her that there isn’t one already).

She loves dark stories with dark magic. No, seriously, she really does and it is starting to become a problem. We might need to revoke her fantasy position and give her something easy like popularized science…nothing bad could come out of that right?