Author Archives: Jerry Dennis

A WORLD OF DISTRACTIONS, AND THE BEST THING I READ TODAY

BEACHES TO WALK, rivers to paddle, trails to hike. The pair of red-headed woodpeckers that nested in our yard. Warblers. A red-eyed vireo laboring to feed a fledgling cowbird half again its size. Visits from friends and family (everyone wants to visit Traverse City in the summer). Neighbors’ lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, chippers. Women’s World Cup on tv. Book tour; print and radio interviews; road food; poor sleep. Fishing with my buds on the Boardman and Ausable and a spur-of-the-minute seven-hour drive north to fish with Tim on his secret river. The storm of the decade and a yard tangle-heaped with fallen trees. Cordwood to cut, split, and stack; enough for three winters. Piles of novels. The Detroit Tigers.

And I wonder why I haven’t written much this summer.

I was saddened to learn recently that one of my favorite literary magazines, PANK, is ceasing publication at the end of this year. Since 2007, M. Bartley Seigel and Roxane Gay have curated some of the most consistently engaging poetry and short prose in print and online. Some of it has been “experimental,” but in PANK literary adventurousness is never obscure. Every issue includes stories and poems that deserve to be read and reread. Their current online edition features this, the best thing I read today (the current issue also features “Anxiety Index” by my friend David Hornibrook; it’s the second-best thing I read today):

My Bliss

Bonnie Jo Campbell

First I married the breakfast cereal in its small cardboard chapel, wax-coated, into which I poured milk. Then I married a cigarette, for the gauzy way the air hung around us when we were together, then a stone, because I thought he was a brick or a block, something I could use to build a home. There was a bird, but flying away repeatedly is grounds for divorce. The shrub was a lost cause from the get-go and the TV gave me marital-tension headaches. The kidney was dull, the liver was slick, the car was exhausting, the monster in the woodshed scared the children (though I found his stink enticing). The teacup was all filling and emptying, emptying and filling. When I married the squirrel the wedding was woodland, the guests scampered, but all that foraging and rustling of sticks and leaves was too much. And the males sleep balled together in another tree all winter! How foolish, my marrying the truck, the shovel, the hair, the hope, the broom, the mail—oh, waiting and waiting for the mail to come! Marrying the cat was funny at first, and I luxuriated in his fur, until I heard his mating yowl, until the claws and the teeth, the penile spines, dear God. Forget the spider, the mask, the brittle bone. And then a slim-hipped quiet confidence leaned against the wall of the Lamplighter Lounge, chalking a pool cue, and I said, Lordy, this is for real. He ran the table, and I fanned myself with a coaster—this was going to last! I called home and divorced a plate of meatloaf. Confidence gave me a good couple of months. I learned aloof and not eating in public, but it did not last. He wasn’t from the Midwest, and besides, tied to a barstool across the room, some drunk’s seeing-eye dog was starting to chew the fishnet stockings off a lady’s artificial leg.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of the forthcoming story collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters (W.W. Norton, October 2015) and the bestselling novel Once Upon a River. She was a National Book Award finalist and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for her collection of stories, American Salvage, as well as a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan with her husband and two donkeys.

4 Replies

SUMMER AND SLOW TIME

SUDDENLY ITS SUMMER—and not just the season of blue skies and verdant woods, of songbirds in the morning, thunderstorms in the afternoon, and fireflies at night, but the languid interlude we remember so fondly from childhood. Then as now it can seem timeless, lazy, as far removed from the productive seasons as the apple tree is from the office.

“Blue Cottage,” courtesy of Glenn Wolff. Visit www.glennwolff.com

For a few years when I was very young my parents thought that summer should be for taking vacations to ocean and mountains, to Chicago or New York or Disneyland. But after one or two trips my brother and I dug in our heels and howled. Why would we want to leave Michigan in the summer? Our house was on an inland lake; we had a dock, a rowboat, a powerboat, a raft on pontoons. There was waterskiing to master, and walleye to catch, and islands to camp on with our friends. Twenty miles away was Lake Michigan with its endless beaches and surging schools of salmon, and within bicycle range were ponds full of bluegills and woods laced with trails and cedar swamps where the creeks were alive with brook trout. There was canoeing, swimming, baseball, and playing with our dog. Who could bear to miss even a day of that? Early in the morning Rick and I slipped from the house and stayed lost until dark. We were explorers of the near-at-hand, world travelers who never had to leave home. It was everything a boy could want.

Or that a man could want. For I’ve changed little after all these years. I still prefer to stay in Michigan in summer, still spend as many days as I can lost in the woods and on lakes and rivers, searching for walleyes and warblers, for wildflowers and champion trees, for strawberries and brook trout.

Summer is the high season for down-and-dirty adventures. It’s for exploring those small, overlooked sanctuaries that time hardly alters—the blueberry bog and the tree-shaded pond and the pine forest where the floor is softer than any carpet. It’s the season for wet shoes and sweat-stained hats, for wearing a canteen on your belt and consulting your compass even if you’re pretty sure you know where you are.

(Adapted from Jerry’s “Reflections” column in Michigan Blue Magazine, summer 2012 issue. Thanks to Lisa Jensen and Glenn Wolff.)

Night Watch on the Malabar

WHEN I WAS A KID I wanted a life of adventure. What kid doesn’t? But I had the wrong idea about it. I thought you had to risk your life. I thought you had to travel to distant places and throw yourself into difficult situations. I didn’t know that ordinary moments can be adventures, too.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a moment that occurred one night when I was motoring in a boat through the Straits of Mackinac. It wasn’t exactly an ordinary experience for me—I was helping deliver the two-masted schooner Malabar from Lake Michigan to the Atlantic while working on the book that would become The Living Great Lakes. There were many rowdy adventures ahead, yet fourteen years later it’s the quiet moments I remember best.

We had just passed beneath the Mackinac Bridge and were approaching the low dark bulk of Bois Blanc Island. Ahead was open Lake Huron—a blackness stretching to the horizon. The night was cold, the wind still, and the Milky Way sprayed a river of stars across the sky. I stood alone in the bow of the boat and hoped the night would never end.

I loved night watch on the Malabar. Usually only the captain, Hajo Knuttle, and I were on deck, and many nights we stood together at the helm and talked. But at some point we always separated, one staying at the helm and the other going to the bow. The pleasure I discovered in those hours surprised me. Being on the water was part of it, but there were deeper satisfactions at play. Maybe it was being in motion, the boat cutting resolutely through the night. And probably it had a lot to do with seeing new places, or old places in new ways. And of course it was exhilarating to be in the Straits, at that crossroads of geography and history. For years I had been studying all we have done to mistreat the Great Lakes and was growing disheartened. But that night the lakes seemed to have changed little over the centuries. It was possible to believe our stains would wash away.

A moment can swell to fill a bigger space. Hours had gone by without much happening, but suddenly there came a moment of radiance. The lake in every direction was glass-smooth and bright with stars, and when I turned to look toward the stern I was startled to see the long trail of the moon on the water stretching to the Mackinac Bridge. The bridge arched in a spray of lights across the Straits, and the gibbous moon was suspended above it.

I wanted the boat to stop. I wanted time itself to stop. I needed the entire night—my entire life—to think about that moment. Already I knew it would stay with me for as long as I lived.

3 Replies

WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: KEITH TAYLOR’S GLADNESS

I WAS A FAN of Keith Taylor’s nature essays and poetry for years before we met, so it’s probably not surprising that I liked him from the first time we shook hands. It was at the first Bear River Writers Conference, on Walloon Lake, Michigan, in 2000, and I liked him so much that I decided we would be friends for life, whether he wanted it or not.

We’ve been pals ever since, and my appreciation for his work just grows stronger. Every Keith Taylor book is extraordinary for its openness, candor, and clarity, and his observations are always sharp and fresh. Consider this, from his new chapbook, Fidelities:

GREEN LIGHT

…

just for a few weeks, from full summer

into September, on quiet days,

warm, humid but not hot—and the light

above the river turns green, like leaves,

reeds, water weeds or water itself

on its gently inexorable

slide through hills to the blue lakes beyond.

Keith travels widely, reads everything, and is one of those people who thinks deeply about the world and our place in it, so I’m always interested in what’s on his mind. I asked him to tell us what he’s been enthusiastic about lately, and his response is pure Taylor:

Oh, I wanted it to be something big! A big book that I could feel was changing my life even as I read it. Proust or Wittgenstein or something! Or something cool out there in the popular culture—a song, a movie, hell, I’d settle for a television show—so I could establish some kind of cultural cred. Or an adventure, undertaken or just planned. Australia, maybe. South Africa. Uzbekistan. Somewhere. Or a poem, one of those that came out of nowhere and just picked up the world, moved it a quarter of an inch, and changed everything (“We must have/the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless/furnace of this world.” Jack Gilbert, “A Brief for the Defense.”). I wanted it to be my rage at oppression and prejudice, but this week I just feel tired. I’m sorry. I’ll be outraged by something next week, I’m sure.

But, no, all I got was one tiny little bird, barely two inches long in a beat-up city park next to a freeway and a factory. A Northern Parula Warbler. A blue-gray back broken around the shoulders by a greenish haze. Two shades of yellow on the upper breast separated by a deep orangish/red band. The lower belly a pure white. It’s song some musical chips followed by a buzzing call. You can see and hear it here: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Northern_Parula/id.

It landed just above my head in an invasive honey-suckle early Monday morning, just before a rain shower. It was on it’s way from somewhere in the tropics to its breeding range in the Upper Peninsula or north of Superior. It sang and sang, right into the rain. I had to leave and it was still singing.

And its light has filled me for the past two days. I’m sorry but that’s it. One little bird I saw when I was alone.

—Keith Taylor’s most recent chapbook is Fidelities: A Chronology (http://www.alicegreene.com/publications/fidelities-a-chronology/). He teaches a little at the University of Michigan.

7 Replies

WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: Joshua Davis, pixies in a tub, and why Homer couldn’t see blue

Next week Keith Taylor weighs in with a wonderful tribute to what’s lighting him up (a clue: it has wings). Until then, here’s what I’ve been enjoying this week:

Joshua Davis

Millions of people have been lit up this spring by the singer/songwriter Joshua Davis, who is one of six remaining contestants on the television talent show, “The Voice.” Joshua, who lives in Traverse City, Michigan, is friends with my son Aaron Dennis and daughter-in-law Chelsea Bay Dennis, and is one of those people who spreads warmth and good will everywhere he goes. His folk/contemporary roots music, his brilliant guitar playing, and his soothing yet edgy vocals are finding a huge and appreciative audience. His rendition of “America” is the best I’ve heard and may have introduced an entire generation to Simon and Garfunkel. And speaking of The Voice, how crazy is it that fellow contestant Sawyer Frederick performed a song this past Monday evening that was written by the singer/songwriter May Erlewine, who lives in northern Michigan and is a close friend of Joshua Davis’s. See May and Seth Bernard perform it here.

______

If you’ve read The Remains of the Day you probably assume you know the British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro. But maybe not. His new novel, The Buried Giant, is a fable set in post-Arthurian England and features an elderly couple in a village run by a totalitarian committee so strict that they refuse to grant elders the use of candles because they are so old they shouldn’t need them. The couple sets off across the land in search of the son they haven’t seen in years and have nearly forgotten (because a mist of forgetfulness has fallen over the land; rumors say the mist was caused by the breath of a she-dragon.) Their quest leads them to an ogre trapped in a ditch—he had been minding his own business, sitting on the bank above the ditch munching on a goat, when some children pushed him in—and to an encounter with truly terrifying pixies that crawl from a river and swarm over the old woman when she falls asleep in the bottom of a tub while drifting with the current. They meet King Arthur’s last remaining knight, decrepit with age but still mounted on his war-horse and wearing his armor, who patrols the countryside determined to slay dragons though he is apparently in no hurry to do so. It is a strange and mesmerizing novel. Sometimes it can be a bit of a trudge, and I wish Ishiguro had cut away some of the pages of dialogue that add nothing to the story and only serve to turn the characters into gasbags. But much of the novel is so deeply imagined that it might have been pulled from the cenote where our night-dreams are born.
______
The other day I was driving to town, in a hurry to be somewhere, when Radiolab came on the radio. I ended up sitting in a parking lot listening and was late for my appointment. If you’re not familiar with this NPR program, I recommend dipping into the archives. In the words of its own website, “Radiolab is a show about curiosity. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience.” It offers complex long-form journalism of the kind I enjoy most and usually find only in books and a few magazines: intellectual detective stories, artfully produced, with surprising and fascinating digressions that circle back to the main storyline with illuminations stuck to them like burrs. It’s thoughtful and smart and often raises as many questions as it answers. The story that made me late, “Why Isn’t the Sky Blue?” (one episode in a series on color), addressed a question I had never thought to ask: Why is the color blue never mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad? Many other colors are mentioned, some many times. But blue? Not once. Nor is blue mentioned in the Icelandic Sagas or many other literary documents from ancient times. Why that might be turns out to be strange and unexpected and leaves us with tantalizing questions about the relationship between language and perception. For instance: Can we see a thing if we have no name for it?

WHAT’S LIGHTING US UP: Mike Delp’s “Work”

Every week, starting this week, I’m asking friends to comment on the books, movies, music, art, natural events, and creative projects that they’ve been finding most interesting and inspiring.

For the first post, I’m honored to present a powerful new poem by Michael Delp. Mike’s an old friend and fishing pal and a terrific writer who spends part of every year in his cabin beside the Boardman River. What’s lighting him up lately? Here’s Mike, in his own words:

“This is the beginning of a series of new poems about the value and necessity of doing work with the hands. I’m talking about what Jim Harrison calls, ‘making the long thought’ which comes to us doing boring, hard manual labor. At a young age, my father taught me tools: saws and hammers, drills and bits, how to work wood into a boat that would actually float. I spent hundreds of hours as a kid weeding, mowing, trimming Christmas trees and later, in college, running an 80 lb air hammer in the summer. I have unloaded boxcars of dried milk, 75 lb bags and a full boxcar, all day in the summer heat, enough time to kill yourself, if you desired. I know what it’s like to dream with weight on the back, and an ache in the arm from pounding nails through two sheets of roofing steel building a pole barn. It all comes down to doing the work, and working the work to make the mind a healthier place where anything, even a poem, might enter into that brief instant of time between the lifting of the hammer and the explosion of the nail into the wood.”

WORK
by Michael Delp

Wondering how it felt for my step-Grandpa, Eby, to see two of his fingers
sliced off in a press at the Lansing Drop Forge,
dancing, he could have thought, in that instant before pain,
to the music of factory vibrations,
while behind him, men at other presses
never stopped or heard his screams over the pounding of their own work.

Wondering how it was that my own father, his heart stuffed with
engineering equations and cigar smoke came home from his office every night,
and helped his only son learn how to run a table saw,
each time teaching, testing the blade’s teeth with his right thumb.

Wondering how his father, an alcoholic sheriff’s deputy stumbling home at night from a
job in what must have seemed like life in a tunnel with no exit,
a black locomotive with a light like God’s eye about to plow him down,
work him into the gravel bed between the tracks.
But this man, my dad’s dad, knew how to build stuff.
He taught my father the value of hands and how they did work.
For six weeks my dad and his two brothers, both younger, tore down
a neighbor’s house and saved every nail and straightened every nail.

And I remember this now, watching him lift a deck board, hand it over to me.
He’s 94 and still in the work. He could do this blindfolded, this work done by hand,
setting wood and nailing it in place, and when I slip my hammer past an 8D sinker,
wrench it almost double
he bends to pick it up,
hands it back and I do what I learned:
set it down and put it back to the shape it was
when I first laid my hands on it.

And both of us, an old man and his son, growing older,
turn again to bend our backs into the work.
And when I say into it, I mean down our arms and through our fingers, the tools working
as if they had blood inside them.

(Michael Delp is a writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction whose works have appeared in numerous national publications. He is the author, most recently, of the limited-edition letterpress chapbook, The Mad Angler Poems, published by Deep Wood Press, and of a story collection, As If We Were Prey (Wayne State University Press). His other books include The Last Good Water (Wayne State, 2003), The Coast of Nowhere (Wayne State, 1997), and Under the Influence of Water (Wayne State, 1992). He recently retired from teaching creative writing at the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he received several awards for his teaching. Mike invites you to visit his Facebook page.)

_______

4 Replies

GETTING THE SENSE OF A PLACE: A GLIMPSE OF NORTHERN MICHIGAN

Today I’m thinking ahead to the University of Michigan’s Bear River Writer’s Conference on Walloon Lake, near Petoskey, Michigan, which will be held May 28-June 1. This is among the finest writing conferences in the country, and I’m pleased to have taught workshops at it every year except one since its inauguration in 2000. Our special guest this year will be the esteemed poet, Stephen Dunn. He’ll join director Keith Taylor and a terrific array of faculty members for five days of hard work, abundant inspiration, great fun, and pretty darned good food. I look forward to it every year.

My workshop will focus on writing about place, so I thought it might be helpful for those who are working with me (and for anyone else who’s interested), to read some of my thoughts on the subject. This is from my book, The Windward Shore, from the chapter “Home Place”:

Getting to know a place is a lot like getting to know a person. As we become acquainted with someone we discover their quiddity, the totality of qualities that define them. Personality is never revealed in just one characteristic, but in their entire being, from the words they say and the way they say them, to the scent of their body, to their manner of walking, to that indescribable but palpable spirit or aura that becomes apparent only when you know someone intimately. Many have wondered if this package of qualities is what we mean when we talk about the soul.

A place, too, has quiddity, or what the ancients called genius loci. It is what people usually have in mind when they talk about the spirit of a place. Many cultures have legends of genii, animated spirits that inhabit specific hills,creeks, and valleys. We’re familiar with the word as the root of “congeniality”—that sense of well-being and welcome we feel when we arrive in a place that seems convivial to us. Find enough congeniality there and you’re likely to say it feels like home.

The spirit is in the details. In language, meaning builds gradually, letter by letter, word by word, but no word exists in isolation. Each is an organism surrounded by communities of association, memory, rootstock. Likewise with a place. Taken alone, every snowflake, cloud, goldenrod, and meadow vole is just itself. Together, in their entwined relationship, they add up to a greater meaning: the fingerprint of the place, its character, its spirit. Every house,stone, tree, the wind, signature scents and colors, the angle and intensity of sunlight, the rain and snow, the songs of birds and insects, the hum of automobile traffic and roar of surf—all add up to make a place itself, unlike any other. They create its fingerprint.

To borrow a word from my vintner neighbors: a place has terroir. Another word applies: autochthony, from the Greek for “of the land” or “emerging from the soil,” and suggesting deep involvement of the sort that results only after we have lived and worked in a place long enough to know it profoundly. Its history entwines with our own until they’re inseparable. When you walk the land, you see stories from your own life blended with it. There is the yard maple I pruned too late one fall, so that the sap poured from it in February. There is the low ground in Martha’s field, where one wet spring a five-acre pond formed, inspiring 12-year-old Nick and his buddy Dan Linsell to haul the red canoe down from the rafters in our garage,portage it across the driveway, and set off paddling downwind on the new lake.When we become involved in a place we feel rooted to it and connected to the other people who live there and who lived there previously and will live thereafter we are gone. We care about it. We will defend it.

Once you recognize what makes a place unique, it is unmistakable. You could be blindfolded, spun around, and led to the backyard of a home you have not seen in years, and the moment the blindfold is removed you would know where you were. You would know it by a conjoining of sensory perceptions too subtle for language, all working together to give the “feeling” of the place…

(From The Windward Shore: A Winter on the Great Lakes, University of Michigan Press, 2011)

2 Replies

WHAT AWES YOU?

A study in the journal Emotion (as reported in The New York Times ) suggests that the sense of awe might be beneficial to your health. As we all know, awe is one of the upbeat moods, along with joy, pride, contentment, enthusiasm, inspiration, amusement, compassion, and love. Most of us have probably suspected that staying upbeat keeps us healthier, but we might not have known why. One reason, according to the study, is that upbeat emotions reduce the levels of a cytokine in the body known as interleukin-6 (usually referred to as IL-6), which promotes chronic inflammation in body tissues and is associated with a variety of serious illnesses.

Subjects participating in the study were given tests to identify their moods. Those experiencing negative emotions such as depression, anxiety, shame, and hostility had higher levels of IL-6. Those experiencing positive moods had lower levels. Most surprising was that those subjects who had recently experienced a sense of awe had the lowest levels of IL-6, and the more often they had experienced it, the lower the level.

Senior author of the study Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, told reporters that awe is generally defined as an emotion that passes “the goose-bump test.” It comes from “listening to music…watching a sunset or attending a political rally or seeing kids play.”

What gives you goose bumps? Where do you go to get your daily dose?

Ken Scott continues to make the world a healthier place with his amazing photos from Michigan’s Leelanau County. For a great example of pure awesomeness, see his time-lapse of an aurora display over Leelanau on YouTube. Also check out his website and Facebook page.

2 Replies

WE LAUNCHED A SMALL PRESS AND ARE PUBLISHING BOOKS SOLD ONLY IN INDEPENDENT STORES. ARE WE CRAZY?

Yes. But it’s a good kind of crazy.

Artist Glenn Wolff and I have made our livings illustrating and writing books for nearly 30 years. In that time we’ve witnessed the publishing industry go through the most dramatic changes since Guttenberg.

When we met in 1986, Glenn and I could not have anticipated how much the world was about to change. Glenn was drawing his illustrations on illustration boards and delivering them in person to art directors in their Manhattan offices; later, when he moved back home to Michigan, he sent them overnight via Fed-Ex.

I was writing my books by hand on legal pads, then typing the final drafts on a typewriter—initially on the manual Royal my parents gave me when I was in high school, then on an industrial-grade electric IBM that rattled so furiously that it walked across my desk as I typed. I made corrections with White-Out, and when the manuscript was finished made a Xerox copy, sealed the original in the carton that the Southworth 25% cotton typewriter paper had come in, and mailed it to my publisher.

By then Glenn was a regular illustrator for the New York Times and for magazines such as Audubon and Sports Afield, where my nature essays were also appearing. We liked each other, had some ideas for books, signed with an agent, and started publishing with New York houses. (You can read the story of our first meeting and the ensuing fun.)

Almost from the beginning we talked about someday starting a small press, an idea that grew with the years, especially after our early collaborations, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes and The Bird in the Waterfall went out of print and we reacquired the rights to them. This summer we had the chance to team up with the wonderful Gail Dennis, a graphic designer with 30 years’ experience designing books and other publications and who is superbly organized and a master at implementing the ideas Glenn and I so casually sling around, and jumped at it. We named the press for the sugar maple in Gail’s and my front yard and Glenn designed a logo featuring its silhouette.

Then we made a momentous decision: Big Maple Press would publish books to be sold only in independent stores.

Why? First, because we want to stay small. We’ve heard too many horror stories about start-ups driven into bankruptcy when big distributors and big chains ordered thousands of books then returned them. We’d rather work closely with a single distributor—Partners Distributing, in Holt, Michigan—and with a manageable number of independent stores that appreciate our books and might be inspired to recommend them to their publishers.

Second, because we hate bullies. In September I was one of 600 authors who signed a full-page letter in the New York Times protesting Amazon’s strong-arm business tactics. As a Macmillan author, I had watched the buy buttons on four of my books and every other Macmillan title disappear from Amazon’s website in 2010, when the publisher refused to buckle in to Amazon’s unreasonable price demands. Not longer after that, Amazon put a stranglehold on small literary publisher Melville House and nearly drove the house out of business. They used the same tactic this year against the large publishing group, Hachette. Jeff Bezos’ oft-quoted statement “that Amazon should approach small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle” sends shivers down our spines. Maybe publishing a book or two a year that the Bully can’t touch will be satisfying, like slinging pebbles at his forehead.

But there’s a third reason, and it’s the one that matters most. Glenn and I owe our careers to independent booksellers. It was they who championed our work starting with our first books, back when the big chains wouldn’t bother with us, and who support and encourage us still. It is only right at this stage of our careers that we should publish special editions that can be purchased only in independent stores.

We’re here—we’ve always been here—because we love books. We love writing, designing, and illustrating them. We love proofing them, opening the first carton of a new title, organizing them on our shelves, opening their covers and burying our noses in their pages, settling into our chairs on winter nights and losing ourselves in them. We’ve poured our hearts into all of our books and made them the best that we can. Now we have a chance to make them even better.

Is that crazy, or what?

7 Replies

WHAT A GLORIOUS MISTAKE A TITLE CAN BE

The new edition, published by Big Maple Press.

Glenn Wolff’s and my “forgotten” book has just appeared for the first time in paperback. The Bird in the Waterfall: A Natural History of Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes was published in hardcover in 1996 by HarperCollins Publishers, on the heels of our national bestseller, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes. We were scheduled to launch Bird in the summer of ’96 with a national tour, and everyone had high expectations for success. Then came bad news.

HarperCollins was in trouble. Profits were down and the corporate suits weren’t happy about it. They fired the upper managers, then herded hundreds of authors out the door and locked it behind them. The accountants had decided it was cheaper to cancel books than to publish them, so they canceled them by the train-load.

The books already in production, including The Bird in the Waterfall, were published but they were orphaned. Our tour was cancelled, as were all other plans for promotion. There was barely enough money in the budget to send out a few copies for review. Glenn and I did the best we could, setting off on a road tour at our own expense that took us from New York to Boston, Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis. Two printings of the hardcover sold out quickly, but HarperCollins declined to print more. They also declined to bring it out in paperback.

: The original HarperCollins edition from 1996.

Over the years Glenn and I turned down several offers from publishers to reprint the book, including one from an Australian firm that wanted to dismantle it and repackage it as a coffee-table book, mostly because we didn’t think they “got” the book and would do it justice. Early this year our agent released it as an ebook and print-on-demand paperback under his firm’s imprint, DCA, and made it available in all the usual online places.

That was fine, but we wanted more. For years Glenn and I had dreamed of giving The Bird in the Waterfall the care that we felt it deserved. So we decided to do the job ourselves. Our first and most brilliant act was to team up with the multi-talented Gail Dennis, who has thirty years experience designing books, magazines, and other publications, and who presented us with many ideas of how to make the book better, from its cover and interior design, to its editorial content, to its title. The three of us formed a small press dedicated to publishing our works in special editions that will be available only in independent bookstores. With Gail as Creative Director and Glenn and I doing art and words, we’ve just released a spanking-new version of The Bird in the Waterfall. In a couple weeks we’ll release the new indie-store edition of It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes. Next year we’ll publish an original new book about wonders of the animal kingdom. You won’t find any of those editions at Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Walmart. I’ll have more to say about Big Maple Press in a few days. For now I want to talk about the title.

Titles are never easy. All my books have required dozens or hundreds of attempts. Often the right one has come in an ah-ha moment, but only after much effort. A Place on the Water and The Windward Shore arrived that way. The title “The Living Great Lakes” was the first to occur to me for that book, yet for some reason I went on to consider and reject more than 100 others before circling back to the original.

But no title has been as tough as The Bird in the Waterfall. During the three years that Glenn Wolff and I worked on the book we constantly fired ideas back and forth. One difficulty was the scale of the project. We wanted to include the entire panoply of water, from the molecular structure to the hydrological cycle; from the behavior of waves, currents, and tides to legends and myths and aquatic wildlife. How could we fit all that into one title?

In the end, with the publisher pressing us for a decision, we fell back on the title of one of our favorite chapters, about the American dipper and its habit of nesting near and even behind waterfalls. Our editor was okay with our choice, but he had doubts. Some friends advised us against it. But we were exhausted and out of time.

Now I’m fond of the title in the same way that I’m fond of the warped floors of our old farmhouse. For the new edition we’ve changed the subtitle to Exploring the Amazing World of Water, which is truer to the spirit of the book than the original. But we’re standing by the old title.

Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea. My favorite criticism so far was posted by a reader on Amazon.com:

“Great Book Hidden by a Lousy Title” by Mark Thrice (5 stars)

“I don’t know what led to the title, ‘The Bird in the Waterfall,’ but it was a misfortune. This book is powerful and teaches in a way that is compellingly interesting. It has nothing to do with birds and little to do with waterfalls. It’s about water and how water keeps our world going—a finite substance—there can never be more water than there is right now on our planet. Trees are slow-motion fountains of water. Get the book— there is so much more in it. Don’t make the mistake of judging this book by its title.”

Do you agree with Mark Thrice? Or should we have gone with Hydrologica?

How about Tidal Waves and Sea Monkeys?

Or should we have settled for Aquamania, Aquatica, Planet Aquatica, Aquatic Planet, Aquatic Oddities, or An Aquatica of the Mind?

Or From Spring to Sea, From Creek to River to Sea, From the River to the Sea, From Sea to Shining Tributary?

I can go on: A World of Water, Abundant Waters, The Spirit of Water, Water on Earth, The Lay of the Water, Sustained by Water, Taking the Waters, Overflowing With Water, Brimming With Water, or Water/Water.

Liquid Planet, Waves on the Planet, The Water Planet.

The Watery Realm, Realms of Water, Realms of Blue, Flow of Blue, Currents of Blue, World of Blue, Blue World, The Water is Blue, Vast Blue Waters, Beyond These Yellow Sands, Between These Yellow Sands, Between These Yellow Shores,Beyond the Deep Blue Sea, Beyond the Ocean’s Rim, Filled to the Brim, Beyond the Deep.

The First Element, Beyond the Shore, Between the Shores.

Over the Waterfall, Behind the Waterfall, Through the Waterfall, The Spirit in the Waterfall.

Prevailing Waters, The Tide is High, Water Tripping, Down in the Flood, Tsunami Dreams, A Mighty Swell, The Great Wave of Kanagawa, The Surface of the Deep, Riffles and Runs, Downstream, Water is Life, Water Itself, Whispering Brook/Bellowing Sea, Waves as Big as Mountains, The Shape That Water Takes, Aquatic Marvels, Water Wonders, It’s a Wet Wet World, All the Rivers Run to the Sea, Defining Water, Pondering Water, The Counsel of Water, Mindful of Water, Mind Full of Water, Literal Water, Neptune’s Realm, Neptune’s Kingdom, River Fast/Ocean Deep, Sargasso Dreams, Past Raging Rocks, The Book of Water, Of Water, About Water, Essential Water, Hands Filled With Water, Views of the Water, Pond to River to Sea, A Fondness for Water, Wade Until Dark.

And, finally, my absolute favorite, which Glenn faxed to me at 3 a.m. as we were finishing the book. It must have emerged from one of his fever dreams: I Think We’re All Hosers on This Boat Where Turtles Dream and Dolphins Dance.

The ebook edition published by DCA.

5 Replies