Tag: #StoriesEmergeLikeBears
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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…
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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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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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The Old Style Place keeping what refuses to be known quickly
I go to The Old Style Place not looking for a wizard, but to unmask and absorb what I was taught. I am grateful, and I am surfeit in the company of a crackling fireplace. At night, I sit quietly and listen to reinforce the balance of my soul.Recalibration begins when I build a fire…
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Thanks to Brief Wilderness. Growing up, everything was noise and splinters; and while I didn’t think I was fat or stupid, my mother said I was. She didn’t say it all the time, but enough that it registered. I never felt the full weight of this ridicule until I wrote a poem when I was…