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SAGA OF A LOVE AFFAIR WITH RADIO
WOJB in smoky voice and guitar. The radio was on in my childhood home, always. A radio keeps songs alive long after they’re hits. I was two years old when Harry Belafonte’s Banana Boat Song climbed the charts, but my hometown station played it for years until it lodged in my mind. Belafonte’s energetic tenor…
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Sounds Older than Sitar
Pulling the cord to start the Evinrude nothing happens. I pull again, and again, nothing. The sound of its cough, a serious protest, carries across the lake in a way that seems older than the sitar.
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Yoga Reset From the Inside
My latest article published in OM Yoga Magazine May 1, 2026 A yoga reset from the inside takes time. And when we stay long enough, the surface may may open-up, curl, or crack like birch bark drying in the sun. But eventually, resistance to self-discovery and tuning into self gives way, and what begins showing…
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Blood Sound
I’d been traveling for two days and was tired of being treated like a number. I’m at a cabin in northern Wisconsin, the Pacific of Hawaii still in me. Opening the door, I step over a creaking threshold, my boots landing on a green throw rug, a lily pad on the lake. Soon I’m listening…
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A Grammar Older Than Roads
The monument is simple. Stone and cement. It holds its ground the way a place does when it has nothing to prove, like The Old-Style Place. For a moment, I was elsewhere, stepping down thirty-three wooden stairs to a Wisconsin lake where loons call. Then the veil lifted. I was back on the bluff, walking…
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The Wood Duck Drum: A Father’s Measure, A Son’s Keeping
At the cabin, the work begins with what has fallen. A lightning-struck oak, opened by time and water becomes a drum. I stand in the lake and carve, an eagle circles overhead then leaves. I keep the rhythm and circle through hand, attention, and rhythm.
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Pressed Shirt, Polished Steel: The Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride
I learned how to dress-up when I was sixteen while working after school at a men’s clothing store in my hometown. The sales staff included four men and one woman. I was there through a highschool distributive education program that paid the state hourly wage ($1.10 at that time) while teaching sales skills. The owner…
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A Northwoods Practice of Stillness, Light, and Listening: When Small is Beautiful
Stories Emerge Like Bears is a forthcoming lyric memoir by Gregory Ormson, set in a Northwoods cabin where attention, labor, and place shape a life lived at human speed. Snowmelt drips from the roof. I watch long enough to feel the pace of winter loosening its grip, giving itself to spring. The water drips without…
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Prime the Pump: What a Northwoods Cabin Taught Me About Learning and Attention
To get anything from my students I had to prime the pump. They were just like the pump, squeaking and whining before finally being coaxed out of their shells to participate.
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Stories Emerge Like Bears A Book Announcement
I’ve signed with Cornerstone Press to publish my lyric memoir Stories Emerge Like Bears Begins at a cabin without running water. You take hold of the red handle and work the pump. At first, there’s only sound, then rhythm takes hold and the water rises. I learned this by doing it at a place where…
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