Category: Writing
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Blue and Broken in the Keweenaw
BLUE AND BROKEN IN THE KEWEENAW Thorburn and I got scolded by a grade school principal in Michigan’s Copper Country. But come on, we were, and are writers. Back then, we were hungry and broke too. Russell Thorburn, Upper Michigan’s first Poet Laureate, had been hired to travel through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula schools to lead…
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A Dust Bath for Five Chickens: satisfaction in small things
I’m in Wisconsin, helping my daughter with a small chicken project. Her five chickens needed a bin in the coop to take their dust baths. So we gathered a couple of old vegetable beds and transferred the soil into sheltered boxes where they could scratch, roll, and clean their feathers. Building a dust bath for…
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Team Flame Takes the Field for The Twin Bill
Today is publication day, and I am delighted to share that my essay, “Team Flame,” appears in Issue 24 of The Twin Bill. The Twin Bill is a literary quarterly devoted to baseball writing and art. Each year, the journal releases a special issue on the day of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game, bringing together…
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Baseball and Cuisine Share One Necessary Ingredient: NOSTALGIA
Baseball and Nostalgia In 2020, I came across a brand-new literary baseball publication started in New York, The Twin Bill. It was started by Scott Bolohan. Immediately, I was enthralled by an online magazine focused on writing and baseball, two of my favorite subjects. So I submitted a piece, “The Diamond Speaks in Runes,” and…
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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…
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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…