Category: Stories Emerge Like Bears
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The Things That Hook Us
Northwoods vacation properties are full of contradictions. People go there for quiet and peace, but upon arriving, immediately unpack the noise makers: TVs, stereos, and phones, and turn them on. Whatever we meant it for, a cabin on the lake, like The Old-Style Place, always delivers what we truly need even if we don’t know…
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Halleluijah in a Northern Wisconsin Bar
Various renditions of every song are worth listening to. Some renditions move beyond our recognition, yet if we appreciate music and musicians, we can find something to enjoy. And some songs are nearly sacramental with ineffable or opaque elements that strongly affect the listener. Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluijah” is one of those songs; it’s not just…
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Blue and Broken in the Keweenaw
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Nothing Is Forced into Action Except the Old Boat Motor
At the cabin, stories rise the way ghosts do. Nobody can produce them on demand. They are, like the Dylan lyric about sons and daughters, “beyond our command.” They flash across consciousness, drift back into the trees, return when they are ready. This is why I come again to Big Casey Lake, to the Old-Style…
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Lightning Bolts and Scars
Lightning Bolts and Stars, a word and music piece by Gregory Ormson, Russell Thorburn, and Darrell Syria, guest on electric guitar. Listen in to this spoken word piece, a precursor to the lyric memoir, Stories Emerge Like Bears, Gregory Ormson’s forthcoming book by Cornerstone Press, UW Stevens Point. Lightning Bolts and Scars, originally published online…
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If Water is Speaking I’m Paying Attention
What does water teach in Stories Emerge Like Bears? In Stories Emerge Like Bears, water is life, it is witness, threshold, mirror, and instruction. In rippling currents, it whispers a welcome and teaches with power and hospitality. Water is my most important instructor. At the river’s edge I once saw the dead released, smoke and…
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What Does a Loon Sound Like at Night?
A loon sound at night is not exactly terror, and not fright in the ordinary sense. But it is the feeling you get when the hairs on the back of your neck rise suddenly while resting in darkness on a northern lake. Something ancient speaks and we respond. If you have ever slept near a…
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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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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…