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"Don't get your hopes up for a year in Norway," Eric Dregni told his wife when he returned from what he considered a disastrous interview with the Fulbright Fellowship committee.
He had applied for one of the organization's coveted travel fellowships with hopes of spending a year in Norway, his great-grandfather's home country. But Dregni didn't speak the language, didn't know anyone there, and he didn't have a solid plan for how he would spend his time. He just knew he would write about it.
To his surprise, he got the call after all, and in 2003 Dregni and his wife, Katy McCarthy, set out for the motherland, despite the fact that she had just discovered she was pregnant. No worries: Norway's generous public health care system would take care of them all.
That was just one point on which the often self-employed freelance writer and teacher (he now teaches full time at Concordia University) found life in Norway diverged from life in Minnesota. His book, "In Cod We Trust," chronicles...