Author Archives: Jerry Dennis

WHAT A GLORIOUS MISTAKE A TITLE CAN BE

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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.
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.BigMaplePress-logo-verysmall

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.

The ebook edition published by DCA.

WOKE TO A WHITE WORLD

Sometimes the world slips through the window and joins us where we live. And, of course, the more fully we live, the more often it joins us.

In December 1991, in the final sprint to finish my first big book, I found myself becoming more alert than usual. It was my first experience with the white-hot stage of sustained composition and the state of heightened attention that makes the world outside and the world of the imagination come together in strange and magical ways. Similar conjunctions have occurred with every book I’ve written, but this was the most vivid of them.

FrogsFishNewIt was a book about wonders of the sky, and to see those wonders all I had to do was step outside and look up. Writing about sunsets and meteor showers and snowflakes and birds in flight made me unusually aware of them. I’ve been chasing that level of awareness ever since.

The first complete draft of It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes: Four Seasons of Natural Phenomena and Oddities of the Sky was nearing completion and I could finally see my way through to the end. For months I had been faxing rough drafts to artist Glenn Wolff, who would then sketch ideas for illustrations and fax them back and call to discuss them. Now he was finishing many of the 80-plus illustrations that would later appear in the book and would inspire reams of praise from critics and readers.

All that year our work seemed like a magnet for wonders. When we were working on the chapter about sunrises and sunsets, we saw night after night for a week the most brilliant sunsets we’d ever witnessed, the result of a volcanic eruption in the Philippines that cast vast clouds of dust into the upper atmosphere and tinted the setting sun shades of vivid scarlet and purple. I saw one sunset so astonishing — not only brilliant with colors, but expanding across most of the sky — that it made traffic on a busy highway I was driving along come to a virtual halt. Late one night Glenn stepped outside his studio after working on the illustration for the aurora chapter, and looked up to see the Northern Lights of a lifetime. He called me and said, “Go outside, right now, and look up.” I stepped out the door, then hurried back inside and woke my sons and wrapped them in blankets and took them outside to the yard. The aurora filled the sky, beams of light radiating from a central spot almost straight overhead, pulsating in curtains of red, pink, and green. I have never seen a more brilliant display.

Frogs-and-Fishes-AuroraNightsBy December Glenn and I were working twelve or more hours a day, seven days a week to meet our publisher’s deadline. Much of the month I was working virtually around the clock, sleeping and writing in the same room, taking catnaps when necessary, often losing track of  time or even whether it was day or night. When I took breaks, it was to read in bed or go for walks outside.

My days turned even crazier when Gail and I sold our house on Eleventh Street and had to vacate it the last week of November, nearly a month before our house on Old Mission Peninsula would be ready for us. My parents came to the rescue and invited us to move in with them in their house on Long Lake — the house where I had lived for much of my childhood and adolescence, and about which I had begun writing the essays that would appear a couple years later in A Place on the Water. For Aaron and Nick, who were 12 and 4 that December, it was a grand adventure — a month of slumber parties with Grandma and Grandpa — and they couldn’t have been happier. It turned out to be a grand adventure for all of us.

Below is an excerpt from the journal I kept during those years. I will always look back upon that winter of wonders as one of the richest and most rewarding periods of my life.

12/1/91 — Walked to Bullhead Lake with Gail and the kids. Day clear and sunny and very cold. The lake freshly frozen, the ice clear and a quarter-inch thick, etched on the top with crystal patterns, like it had been spread with a broad plaster knife. Thousands of tiny snow fleas (Boreus hyemalis?) hopped methodically, three inches at a leap, away from shore on the ice. Each, when it landed, adjusted for direction before leaping again in a surprisingly straight course out from shore. Where were they headed? Through the ice, as visible as if seen through glass, were water boatmen and other aquatic organisms moving around among the decomposing leaves on bottom. The woods are snow-free after the fohn-like winds of last week, but the leaves are frozen into crunching mats, and the temperature now is cold enough to burn your face and ears.  Glove weather. Aaron and Nick are always enervated by a walk in the woods.

Frogs-and-Fishes-NatureBaroqueHard to get back into the book after the three days off to move. Worn out the first day or two; simply lazy now. Would prefer to nap and read novels and daydream. Language lacks importance. Strange to be in the house of my childhood. I’ve commandeered a bedroom for my office, and sleep alone in it. Best that way, I think, since I expect to re-catch the fever soon and be working late nights again.

12/2 — Another very cold day. Gray stratus has us locked into a colorless and dreary world. The lake this morning was partially frozen, especially on this lee shore between here and the island. Some of the new ice was coated with a fine dusting of snow crystals, the kind that materializes out of clear sky. Had to dust off the car this morning, and scrape the frost. Wind came up by mid-morning and the ice Frogs-and-Fishes-NaturesTantrumsdisappeared. Another night or two as cold as last night and the entire lake will skim over, then the wind won’t be able to slip beneath the ice to break it up.  Now I’m alone in the house and still can’t get my passion back for the book. Worked some on tornadoes and hurricanes, but can’t seem to get fired up in spite of dangerously near deadline. Need to back into it slowly and surprise myself. Work on something that seems easy. Do busy work until I can dig in and compose again.

12/3 — Woke to a white world. Snow made fine by the cold; drifts to three or four feet. School closed. The lake unfrozen, no doubt because of the strong winds all night — open water looks peculiar when surrounded by snowy landscapes. Excitement of the unusual, unexpected. The day the color of a black-and-white print in excellent focus.

12/9 — Crazy salad days. Blitzing on the book now; not far from having all the first drafts finished. The rest will be relatively easy. Worked nearly 17 hours Saturday and finished two chapters. Working long days and nights, sleeping late (when I can), piling words upon words upon words.

The weather has been bizarre, though I’ve had little time to be out in it. The view from the picture window here has been interesting: Last week the lake froze entirely, then snow covered it with enough weight to streak it with cracks that soaked through and looked like snowmobile tracks. Everyone thought it was here to stay, and that, like most years, we would have heavy snow cover before the ice had a chance to firm up solid. Then, the sixth, thaw: overnight the snow on the lake puddled to a continuous layer of water over the clear ice (we could see through it to bottom even from the house). Then, the seventh, rain and warm wind. By the eighth the lake broke open again, all the ice except some shore piles melted, most of the snow gone. Today it’s clear and sunny, 40 degrees, breeze from the west, and the driveway is damp gravel and the yard has patches of open areas. If this holds until we move on the 18th I’ll be a grateful guy.

I love this stage of a book. I’m so engaged in composition that I experience a psychological equivalent of continental drift: subterranean plates are shifting, grinding one another, and something that lies beneath, something vaguely sensed, threatens to come visible. I’m in a continuous state of mild excitement, with moments of intense excitement and lucidity. Everything seems possible; no project is beyond my abilities. It seems now it would be the easiest thing in the world to sit down and compose fiction — and a relief, not having to worry about getting the facts right. If this confidence lasts beyond the completion of the book I want to begin work in January on a series of new stories. And a series of nature essays. And a novel…

12/13/91 — Stealing a few minutes from 2:20 AM. Buried to the eyebrows. Don’t know if I will finish the book on deadline or not — don’t know anything. Paul Bowles notes the difference between a diary (things that happened) and a journal (what I think about the things that happened), but I don’t know whether it applies to real life. Watched three otters this morning diving and swimming out front. They came to shore finally, swimming underwater even in the very shallow water, then climbed up on the bank and nosed around for awhile. Very sociable with one another, always close, frequently touching and rubbing. They took turns rubbing their backs and sides on patches of snow; if there had been more on the bank perhaps they would have slid. They seem extremely confident creatures — superb at what they do best — so efficient in the business of getting around and getting enough to eat that they have leisure to do it beautifully and leisure to be inquisitive. Hard to tell from our vantage in the house (Gail and Mom watched too, and we were all sorry that the kids weren’t here), but they may not have been quite full-grown. All were similar is size (though one may have been slightly larger than the other two — they did not stay still long enough to give much opportunity for comparison) which made me suspect they are siblings. They took their time getting back in the water, then porpoised away to the drop-off. At one spot between Johnson’s and Menzel’s, maybe 30 feet out from the drop-off, they dove repeatedly for perhaps 10 minutes, often coming up and making chewing motions. I’m sure they were feeding, but could not see on what, even with binoculars. Not fish. That’s what happened. I don’t know what I think about it.  Yes I do: I think the otters traveled up the creek from Lake Dubbonnet and only visit Long Lake in late fall because Long Lake in the summer is full of power boats and is an unhealthy place for otters. And I think it is mighty intelligent of them to know it.

Weather continues strangely mild. Steady rain much of today. Forecast is for freezing rain tonight and snow tomorrow, then cold and snow forever. The lake is so anxious to freeze it produces thin plates of ice in spite of the mild temperatures, then the wind breaks them into slivers that gather in odd loose slush-like aggregations for 10 or 20 feet out from the windward shore. The waves are sharply ruffled until they reach the layer of slush, then are soothed, like a blanket laid over a troubled child. The wind has blown from several directions this week, which I suspect means we’re in for stormy weather. It was from the southeast this morning, then from the west this afternoon. We’re in for it.

Frogs-and-Fishes-IceBird12/14 — Woke up to snow on the ground and it has been snowing continuously and in increasingly heavy amounts all day. Now, late afternoon, we’re in mild blizzard conditions, with visibility reduced enough to obscure the far shore of the lake, and the island at times, and accumulations of six inches or so on the ground. The wind, gusting from the north, has kept the lake from freezing, and the lake looks like it doesn’t like the idea one bit. It looks like winter is thumping its heavy way in for good. Just in time for moving day Wednesday. After two weeks of non-stop work on the book I had to take a break yesterday afternoon and found myself incapable of doing much but watching television basketball. Recovered the juice about 1:30 AM, worked for an hour, then went to sleep and woke up refreshed and ready to hit it today. Clubbing away….

12/16 — Fighting the flu or something. Could sleep and sleep and sleep. The lake froze over last night, during a fairly heavy snow, so that today it is white and slushy already, with continental outlines of black where it has cracked. Still a wide area of open water to the northeast of the island, but everywhere else it is frozen. At leave 12 inches of snow on the ground. Went out long enough today to catch snow crystals on my jacket sleeve, then had to return to bed. Picking away at random paragraphs on the book. Too weak to care about deadlines. Mixed in with the lethargy of illness come moments of elation, even spurts of creativity. Might have written a poem yesterday, the first in months. Instead of sleeping at night I’m reading all the 1987 issues of Antaeus and Paris Review. In the midst of a lot of intellectual weight-lifting and pompous posing, some brilliant essays and stories, notably by William Kittridge and Donald Hall. Otherwise, much self-important wheezing. Donald Hall says reading should be done with the tongue and mouth, and that most critics read only with their eyes.

Saw a pair of pileated woodpeckers flying overhead one afternoon last week. They seemed too heavy for flight, as if their bones were solid. Between each wing stroke they plummeted, rose when they beat, then plummeted — if they had missed a stroke they would have fallen to the ground like hatchets.Frogs-and-Fishes-ToughBirds

Up against the usual dualities. I want to dedicate my life to literature, but after two or three days of hard work I long to be with the kids outside, free of language; outside I soon long for the intimacy of my desk, a pool of yellow lamplight, and a stack of notebooks. Can neither be satisfied just living nor just reacting to living. Want both, somehow, simultaneously. In the act of writing I feel most alive, but it’s not enough. I want to carry the intensity of creation to the ordinary moments of existence. I want meaning to adhere to experience, but don’t want to intellectualize experience. The solution perhaps is to cultivate a moderate level of mania: one in which my judgment is not distorted, and from which the fall to the ground is not crippling. Can I sustain such a level for a solid month?

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MAY I LIVE IN YOUR BOOKSTORE, PLEASE?

If you own a bookstore you’d be very smart to hire me. I would never be late for work and would cheerfully clean the bathroom when necessary and add pennies from my own pocket to the take-a-penny dish. I would make your customers feel so welcome that they would run home and get their sleeping bags and come back to have a slumber party and maybe move in forever. I would have hundreds of books in mind to recommend and would run through most of them before I thought to recommend those I wrote myself. If any customers wanted to buy any of the books I recommended but didn’t have enough money I would loan it to them. When they countered with book recommendations of their own, as customers often do, I would buy them on the spot, probably two or three for every conversation. I would also buy ten or twelve new releases and classics and obscure translations every day because in my house we’ve been getting rid of furniture lately to make more room for books. Three times a day I would buy coffee and sandwiches on the premises because I would never want to leave the store. Also I would work for free.

So you can imagine how much fun I had last Saturday working the Indies First celebration at two of my favorite bookstores. Indies First is a national event championed by Sherman Alexie to draw  support for independent bookstores everywhere, and it inspired 1,000 authors across the country to donate their time November 30 to work in 500 or so stores. I split the day between Horizon Books in Traverse City, Michigan and McLean & Eakin Booksellers 75 miles away in Petoskey. And I wasn’t alone. I teamed up with artist Glenn Wolff, who is on tour to promote his and Bob Sullivan’s A Child’s Christmas in New England (and Glenn has illustrated many of my books, including the newly updated It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes). Other writers and artists were there also, some of them on overlapping schedules, so in addition to chatting all day with customers I got to talk with some author/artist friends I haven’t seen in a while as well as a few new ones. It was fun comparing notes and learning who had books coming out and who had recently been given options for movies. It was even more fun talking about the books we’ve been reading.

Glenn Wolff, Jerry Dennis, and Matt Norcross at McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, MI

Glenn Wolff (with A Child’s Christmas in New England), Jerry Dennis (with It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes), and Matt Norcross (with The Living Great Lakes) at McLean & Eakin Booksellers, Petoskey, MI

Matt and Jessilynn at McLean & Eakin had asked their visiting writers to provide them with a list of six books they wanted to recommend. They then ordered copies of them and displayed them along with the visiting authors’ books. I was delighted to see Glenn’s and my books displayed in stacks all over the store, including at the prime spots next to the cash register, in the staff recommendations section, and on the shelf over the stairway leading to the lower level. Like only independent bookstores can, they made Glenn and me feel like we’re maybe a little special. Combine that with how jazzed we were to talk about books, and we had a pretty great day.

Here’s my list of recommendations:

No Need of Sympathy: Poems, Fleda Brown (BOA Editions, 2013). Fleda’s a friend but that’s not why her book is on the list. I was pretty sure I was going to include it because of one poem: “The Kayak and the Eiffel Tower,” which I first read when it won a Pushcart Prize in 2009, then reread so many times that it started to seem like my favorite poem of all time. It’s a memory of childhood blended with a sort of dream to reproduce the incandescent perceptions of a child seeing the world in all its strangeness and perplexity. It’s haunting and beautiful and heartbreaking and musical. So are the rest of the poems in the book. I read it in one sitting – 84 pages while my coffee and oatmeal went cold on the table before me – then went back to page one and read it again. It’s up for a bunch of prestigious awards and I predict it will win.

The Maytrees, Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 2007). I’ve been a fan of Dillard’s essays since Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, but for some reason was skeptical about her fiction. Holy crap, was I wrong. I wondered in a previous post how I had managed to live without this vivid and powerful exploration of  love in all its forms. Months after finishing the book I had a  dream in which I explained to someone that I loved it fiercely because “its language had entered my body and was flowing through my veins.” Weird. But somehow it seems true.

Death at the Lighthouse, Loren Graham (Arbutus Press, 2013). Graham’s A Face in the Rock: The Tale of a Grand Island Chippewa is a book I’ve recommended for years during my travels to talk about the Great Lakes, so I was stoked when Nancy Dwyer at Falling Rock Cafe and Bookstore handed me this second installment on the history of Lake Superior’s Grand Island. I bought it on the spot and read it in a gulp. Shortly after Graham and his wife purchased and restored the lighthouse at the north end of the island he began researching the 1908 murder of the lighthouse keeper and his assistant that took place there. It became his summer project (he was a college professor, now retired). The result, some forty years later, is a riveting and complex tale that draws on the history of the entire U.P. and brings the place and the era to life. The book is full of typos – I can’t understand why, in this age when it’s so easy to correct them – but I like the book so much that I found it easy to forgive them.

Brown Dog, Jim Harrison (Grove Press, 2013). For weeks I’ve been savoring an advance copy of this collection of novellas, the first five of which were published in collections spanning more than 20 years. Last winter I re-read them in sequence, and came away convinced that if they were published as a separate book they would form an epic 500-page novel that would one day be considered Harrison’s magnum opus. This volume includes a new novella, bringing the total to six. Brown Dog is a unique character in our literature and absolutely unforgettable. He’s a Yooper and most of the stories take place in the U.P. and couldn’t have taken place anywhere else. I recommend reading it with a six pack of Old Milwaukee and a bag of pork rinds.

The Dogstars, Peter Heller (Knopf, 2012). After Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this is my favorite post-apocalyptic novel. The writing drew me in with its originality and unorthodox constructions, but the story kept me turning the pages. It’s a love story as well as a story of survival and hope. Of the many interesting characters, my favorite is a dog. I’ve read it twice this year.

Force of Blood, Joseph Heywood (Lyons Press, 2012). Credit for my late-arriving interest in crime fiction has to go to Heywood, whom I’ve met and corresponded with, and to Aaron Stander, author of half a dozen novels in the Ray Elkins mystery series, most recently Death in a Summer Colony (all of which I highly recommend). Heywood’s Woods Cop series features Grady Service, a DNR game warden, who takes on game violators, drug smugglers, plunderers of Native-American holy sites, and other scoundrels in the Upper Peninsula. I’ve been reading Heywood for a while now, and he keeps getting better — and more prolific. This year he published two new novels and collection of stories, all of which are on my Christmas list. I love that Heywood spends many weeks every year patrolling with game wardens in the U.P. No doubt it’s why he writes with such immediacy and verisimilitude. Plus he can flat-out tell a good stories.

 

The Best Thing I Read Today

“In thin oils she depicted clumsy beaches and clouds. Their foregrounds and middle grounds showed jetsam and wrack, stained waves, brown bottles, steamer shells, broken china, waxed paper, church keys, foil, nails sticking through in lumber, clamshells, tires, purses, shoes – only two or three objects on each canvas. With a sable brush she graphed each torn string of a crab trap against dirt pink sky. Color was local. It allowed an ocean like red marcelled hair. Everything was littoral. Sandpipers pecked child footprints in mud. Storm sea like a ripsaw blade, and clouds in a mumble nearing. She would no more scumble a cloud than kill a child.”  — Annie Dillard, The Maytrees

How have I lived without this novel? I’ve been only part human, mostly a bog of strewn organs, chuckleheading my way through wastelands of half-dead language. But now I’m feasting — plucking Dillard’s delicious sentences and eating them for breakfast and dinner – or, rather, chewing on them, running my tongue over them, clicking them against my teeth, tucking the ones I like best in my cheeks for later rechewing, the way beautiful Sairy did as a toddler with apple pulp and cheese.

I’ve used Dillard’s essays for many years in my workshops on nature writing and writing about place. Now I can add this beautiful short novel to the list of books I most recommend.

It makes me ravenous. Think I’ll run outside and eat the world.

Hail the Unfinished Project

With labor day behind us and the first autumn leaves skittering across the patio, it’s time to roll up the sleeves and get to work. I’m not all that ambitious by nature, so it must be the cooler temperatures that have me energized. Or maybe it’s a residue of all those years of summer vacation when we were kids. School has started, the fun’s over, and now they’re piling on the assignments.

So now I’m faced with all the work I’ve been putting off all summer. First up is the upstairs bedroom that the kids and Gail stripped in June of its circa 1972 red shag carpet and emptied of furniture and all the stuff the boys had been storing there since they were 3 and 11. For much of their youth, this was Aaron and Nick’s room, and their marks are all over it. The dents in the plaster are from hockey pucks, I suspect; the yellow swaths of scotch tape from their posters and art; the U of M decal on the window a memento from Aaron’s Freshman year in Ann Arbor. In 2001, when Aaron was briefly at home after finishing college, he and Nick painted a mural across the entire west wall. The mural has given our family much pleasure over the years, but this weekend Gail and I set ourselves the task of painting the room, as part of our new fix-it-up and clean-it-up policy. After deliberation we decided we had no choice but to cover the mural. Tough decision. But we want the room to be either a guest room or, perhaps, the new master bedroom, and in either case the mural must go. I hope some future conservator can figure out a way to get back to the masterpiece beneath.

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There’s also the issue of unfinished work work. Like everyone I know, I start many projects but finish only a few. But unlike more organized, mature, and clear-headed people, I never throw away the work I abandon. That’s probably because I think of it as pending, not abandoned. It wasn’t a problem for the first decade or so of my career, but now that I’ve been at it for a full geologic epoch, the unfinished stuff is heaped to the rafters.

I won’t burden you with the complete list, but here, in the leaf-turning spirit of the new season, is some of the stuff I intend to finish this fall and winter:

– a short story that I’ve been working on for a ridiculously long time – an embarrassingly long time – more than ten years — that begins with the sentence: “Monkeys make poor pets.”

– an inquiry into the literal and figurative trails that weave through our lives.

– a batch of short (and short-short) stories about men behaving badly. (Very badly.)

– a long essay that might end up being a short book celebrating the wind.

– an essay about starlings and William Shakespeare.

– a study of Niagara Falls and the bizarre industries that have collected around it.

– approximately 20 poems that have burst upon me in recent months and are howling for attention.

– an essay about the man who saved my father from drowning when he was 17 years old.

– an homage to white space on the page and roominess in our lives (have you ever noticed how much room there is in the word “room”?)

So, to work. A fresh sheet of paper in the old Royal beater. Roll it up, indent, fingers on QWERTY. Begin:

“Monkey’s make poor pets. But how could Melody know?…”

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The Beauty of the Mysterious

Einstein’s 1921 Nobel Prize Portrait

I’m not sure if we should be lionizing our geniuses, but in the face of all we don’t know, what else can we do? Albert Einstein is the nearest we’ve come so far to a secular wise man. Here he is on the subject he spent his life pondering: the mystery of the universe:

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead:  his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms – this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong in the ranks of devoutly religious men.”

– Albert Einstein, “Strange is Our Situation Here Upon Earth,” from Living Philosophies.

8/15/13

We’re getting good press! The August issue of Traverse Magazine opens with an interview with Jerry Dennis talking about the newly updated edition of his and Craig Date’s classic paddling guide, Canoeing Michigan Rivers: A Comprehensive Guide to 45 Rivers (Thunder Bay Press, 2013). And this week on Michigan Radio’s “Stateside with Cynthia Canty,” Cynthia interviews Jerry about the book, his favorite rivers, and his thoughts about the health and welfare of Michigan’s rivers, inland lakes, and Great Lakes.