GLENN WOLFF AND I have been making limited-edition broadsides for awhile now. First with Chad Pastotnik over at Deep Wood Press (“The Trout in Winter”), and now at our own Big Maple Press. What’s a broadside? We get asked that a lot. In short: a one-page work of art and text suitable for framing.

But there’s more to it than that. The art in this case is intaglio—etchings on zinc plate, which are hand rubbed with ink, placed in an etching press, and embossed deeply into the paper. Glenn then hand colors each one.

See the entire process here, at our Big Maple Press website…

Literature and music come closest of all the arts to matching the creative opulence and diversity of nature. Just as the 117 elements in the Periodic Table are the raw material for all physical matter, the 26 letters in our alphabet create a spoken/written universe of virtually endless variety. Putting letters and words into new order is an organic profusion, wild, fluid, and unstoppable, not learned so much as tapped into, as if we discovered language by driving a pipe into the literary equivalent of an artesian well. Writers who tap into that aquifer take for granted that readers will accept their profuse output—not just accept it, but relish it, snapping up words like plump berries we pop into our mouths, bump against our teeth, roll across our tongues, and bite to release bursts of nectar. Certain sentences and paragraphs are so sensuous that just reading them is never enough. No wonder we say of a favorite book that we “devoured” it, or “ate it up,” or found it “delicious.”

So it shouldn’t be surprising that literary descriptions of food and have so often inspired feasts of language. As a reader, I want to enjoy every bite—feel the words on my tongue, taste combinations so unusual and surprising that they are like new classes of flavors. Here are a few offerings to dine upon:

From Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin:

“…But you may not be familiar with the foods that Harry Penn holds dear to his heart. He and his daughter have favorites, which I’ll teach you how to make.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, durbo cheese stuffed with trefoil, camminog, meat of the vibola, roast bandribrolog seeds, satcha oil hotcakes, young Dollit chicken in Sauce Donald, giant broom berries, crème de la berkish tollick, serbine of vellit, pickled teetingle, chocolate wall hermans, trail lemons, Rhinebeck hot pots with fresh armando, parrifoo of aminule, vanilla lens arrows, fertile beaties, archbestial bloodwurst, Turkish calendar cake, fried berlac chippings, cocktail of ballroom pig, vellum cream cake, undercurrents, crisp of tough boxer lamb, sugared action terries, merry rubint nuts, and rasta blood-chicken with sauce Arnold.

“Always flour the marble before you put down an uncooked lens arrow. Sprinkle the vanilla. Cut it fast!” she screamed, her fat sausagelike arms flailing about the medicine ball. “Otherwise, it sticks. Sticky little bastards, lens arrows. Did your mother ever teach you how to properly bone a good serbine of vellit?”

From the “Cyclops” section of Joyce’s Ulysses:

“Thither the extremely large wains bring foison of the fields, flaskets of cauliflowers, floats of spinach, pineapple chunks, Rangoon beans, strikes of tomatoes, drums of figs, drills of Swedes, spherical potatoes and tallies of iridescent kale, York and Savoy, and trays of onions, pearls of the earth, and punnets of mushrooms and custard marrows and fat vetches and bere and rape and red green yellow brown russet sweet big bitter ripe pomellated apples and chips of strawberries and sieves of gooseberries, pulpy and pelurious, and strawberries fit for the princes and raspberries from their canes.”

From Donald Barthelme’s story “The Zombies,” in Great Days, in which a zombie, visiting the only village for miles around that is willing to sell wives to zombies, tries to win a bride for himself by describing the copious breakfasts served in zombie homes:

“Monday!” he says, “Sliced oranges boiled grits fried croakers potato croquettes radishes watercress broiled spring chicken batter cakes butter syrup and café au lait! Tuesday! Grapes hominy broiled tenderloin of trout steak French-fried potatoes celery fresh rolls butter and café au lait! Wednesday! Iced figs Wheatena porgies with sauce tartare potato chips broiled ham scrambled eggs French toast and café au lait! Thursday! Bananas with cream oatmeal broiled patassas fried liver with bacon poached eggs on toast waffles with syrup and café au lait! Friday! Strawberries with cream broiled oysters on toast celery friend perch lyonnaise potatoes cornbread with syrup and café au lait! Saturday! Muskmelon on ice grits stewed tripe herb omelette olives snipe on toast flannel cakes with syrup and café au lait!” The zombie draws a long breath. “Sunday!” he says. “Peaches with cream cracked wheat with milk broiled Spanish mackerel with sauce maitre d’hotel creamed chicken beaten biscuits broiled woodcock on English muffin rice cakes potatoes a la duchess eggs Benedict oysters on the half shell broiled lamb chops pound cake with syrup and café au lait! And imported champagne!”

Here is Mark Twain, from Autobiography of Mark Twain (The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1), remembering meals at his uncle’s farm in the 1840s:

“It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my uncle John’s. The house was a double log one, with a spacious floor (roofed in) connecting it with the kitchen. In the summer the table was set in the middle of that shady and breezy floor, and the sumptuous meals – well, it make sme cry to think of them. Fried chicken; roast pig; wild and tame turkeys, ducks and geese; venison just killed; squirrels, rabbits, pheasants, partridges, prairie chickens; homemade bacon and ham; hot biscuits, hot batter-cakes, hot buckwheat cakes, hot “wheatbread,” hot rolls, hot corn pone; fresh corn boiled on the ear, succotash, butter-beans, string beans, tomatoes, peas, Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes; buttermilk, sweet milk, “clabber;” watermelons, musk melons, cantaloupes — all fresh from the garden — apple pie, peach pie, pumpkin pie, apple dumplings, peach cobbler — I can’t remember the rest. The way that certain things were cooked was perhaps the main splendor — particularly a certain few of the dishes. For instance, the corn bread, the hot biscuits and wheatbread and the fried chicken. These things have never been properly cooked in the North — in fact, no one there is able to learn the art, so far as my experience goes. The North thinks it knows how to make corn bread, but this is gross superstition. Perhaps no bread in the world is quite as good as Southern corn bread, and perhaps no bread in the world is quite so bad as the Northern imitation of it.

Yummy. Do you know of other copious literary breakfasts, lunches, dinners, or snacks? Please let me know. I’m hungry!

EVERY YEAR THERE’S A DAY when summer gives way suddenly to autumn. Last year it began before dawn on September 30, when the temperature fell from the fifties into the forties and a powerful wind funneled down the Great Lakes. By midmorning, waves had reached twelve feet. NOAA measured one rogue near the center of Lake Michigan at twenty feet.

A week earlier Gail and I had walked to the meadow behind our house and found summer still lingering. It was September 22, the autumn equinox, but except for the scarlet sumac it could have been July. We walked through goldenrod, knapweed, thistle, and New England aster, all in robust blossom. Honeybees droned and grasshoppers skittered ahead of us.

Usually we’ve had a spell of cold weather by the end of September, but last year the season was slow to change. There had been no frost and none of those sudden, slanting rains so characteristic of autumn in Great Lakes country. The days stayed bright and warm and the nights mild.

Of course we knew all the things we love about fall were coming, followed, perhaps sooner than we wished, by winter. We’d been noticing subtle changes since August, when the afternoon light grew brassy as the sun eased lower in the, and the nights began to cool. Starlings were flocking and lining up on telephone lines, sometimes in such numbers that the wires sagged dangerously. Along the Great Lakes shores monarch butterflies fluttered southward on their way to the mountains of Mexico. People on the beach lay in the sun or swam, but you could sense an urgency. They knew every day might be the last.

Autumn reminds us to enjoy every day. It reminds us, also, of transience and mortality. I mentioned once to my friend Emily Thompson, who is a biologist at Washtenaw Community College, that I sensed oblivion when apples fell to the ground to rot and animals disappeared into their burrows for the winter. Emily pointed out that I was being short-sighted. The seeds in decaying fruit and the animals that hibernate are not falling into oblivion, but merely waiting for spring. They are “sort of spring-loaded,” she said, “ready to bust out with offspring at the first warm weather.”

We’re spring-loaded, too, and can take comfort knowing that renewal is waiting on the other side of the sun. In the meantime we have October, the scent of burning leaves, hunting camp, the flame colors in the trees, those slanting rains rattling against the windshield. That morning last year when waves rushed the length of Lake Michigan and the temperature plummeted, I slipped into a down jacket, put on a wool cap, and walked out to meet the season straight on.

[Originally published in Michigan Blue Magazine, Autumn 2015. Copyright Jerry Dennis]

LAKE MICHIGAN IS BLUE TODAY, the color of robins’ eggs and summer sky. Other days it shows blues as varied as a painter’s palette. I have never seen it match the electric indigo of the Gulf Stream or the surreal carnival blues of Caribbean flats, but I’ve seen it as powder blue, baby blue, and the blue of faded jeans. Some days it is as subtle as herons, others as vibrant as bluebirds. It can be periwinkle, phlox, or forget-me-not blue. It can be blueberry blue.

(photo by Chelsea Bay Dennis)

Water has some chameleon in it. It can mimic the bottom – khaki of sand, ash of zebra mussel beds – or reflects the sky or the trees along shore. It might be green with algae, red with suspended clay, or white with finely ground stone.

To appreciate these differences, we have to remember that water reveals two kinds of color. True color is usually a result of dissolved or suspended materials. If water is turbid it is probably because it contains suspended colloids so small that a single particle can take fifty years to settle.

But most of the water in the Great Lakes, although it appears in many shades of blue, is as transparent as the crystal stream emerging from a hose. The blue we see is its apparent color, loaned to it by reflections of the sky on the surface or by the separation of blue from sunlight’s spectrum in the depths of the lake.

My wife and I were talking about all this one evening as we walked the shore near our home. Gail, who is an artist, is intently aware of color. We made a game of listing the blues we saw in the lake. Gail saw phlox and iris, turquoise, sapphire, and lapis lazuli. I saw enameled cookware and razor blades and the hot blue at the base of a candle flame.

Then she challenged me to look more deeply and see the colors and shapes an artist sees. I concentrated and for the first time perceived water as a painter must, as a problem of technique. The waves as they came to shore no longer had mass and weight, but were two-dimensional arrangements of light and color. I saw not “waves” but  wavering bars of blue, rose, and gold shifting on a flat background. John Ruskin concluded that “To paint water in all its perfection is as impossible as to paint the soul.” I understood why he thought so.

The wind fell, the water calmed, and the colors grew softer. My eyes swam – it turns out that looking is hard work. While Gail sat in the sand and sketched, I collected a pile of stones and threw skippers until the sun was gone.

(Adapted from The Bird in the Waterfall: Exploring the Amazing World of Water, illustrated by Glenn Wolff. Available now in an updated edition.)

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you’ll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

“Postscript” by Seamus Heaney, from The Spirit Level. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.

A few weeks ago I got “schooled” in social media. The occasion was my first blog post for Mother Earth News, “A Murmuration of Starlings”, about the swirling, shifting, switching formations of starlings in large flocks.

My point was about looking at the glass half-full: That starlings are invasive species and a scourge, yet in many ways they are beautiful. I expected some push-back, but I was unprepared for the huge and varied reaction the article received on the Facebook page of Mother Earth News. I was astonished and pleased that it received thousands (and thousands and thousands) of shares and likes. And then I began reading some of the hundreds of comments and couldn’t stop laughing. They were as various as nature itself:

The first hundred or so were of this sort:

“Wow.” “Awesome.” “Beautiful.” Breathtaking!!!! “Unbelievable!” “Mozart kept starlings—he said they gave him melodies.”

Then came:

“As bad as cane toads.” “What a flocking load of rubbish.” “This an invasive species. I have been shooting all the starlings I see.” “Bad idea to bring them here. I say let’s send them all back to Europe!” “Reading the comments here, I thought for a moment this was about immigrated Europeans and Native Americans, LOL!” “Starlings are flying rats.” “Kinda like the morning doves…just sit in the feeder and crap and ‘coo’, and ‘coo’ and crap, ALL the time.” “Starlings are a scourge on the continent.“ “They are parasitic, laying their eggs in other birds nests! Nasty buggers!!” “Those dad-burn mother flockers….”

Then there were reactions to the photo I selected, which had looked fine until it was posted:

“Somebody really messed with the filter to get it to look like that. Usually they look more like a dirty oil slick.” “Breathtaking photo.” “Photoshopping a nasty invasive species doesn’t make it great!” “This is not the true color. They’re a dingy black brown color with a minuscule touch of green.” “Their iridescent colorings are amazing!”

And then (of course) there were the irrelevant and absurd:

“Hey girlfriend. Miss you!” “Not a humming bird but hello Alexa.” “Can you do your hair like this?” “I must attempt to draw, once I get my flat tidy.” “I wonder if it’s a high roller or low roller….claireese?” “The local church has murmurations daily. Its amazing to watch.”

What did people say about the article I put so much work into researching and writing?

“Didn’t read the article; but the photograph is stunning.” “Pretty cool. There is a group in England that is collecting videos of starling murmurations and attempting to decipher the mathematics of their flights.” “Bloody starlings!!! So majestic in migration…was lucky enough to see the “smoky haze” off the coast of Brigatine NJ last fall.” Finally: “This article was an education!”

I thought that one result of this minor sensation would be that thousands of people would “flock” to my website to find out about the book from which the article was adapted. But, no. My son Nick who is an expert on social media (he co-owns the web design and marketing firm Binary Trail) laughed and said “ It doesn’t work that way, Dad.” And then he set out to school me, too.

(“Murmurations of Starlings” is adapted from A Walk in the Animal Kingdom. Learn more about it here.)

IN THE JACKPINE AND ASPEN COUNTRY OF CRAWFORD COUNTY a hill rises between cedar swamps. I was poking around there in early May not long ago, searching the woods for morels, and decided to climb the hill to get some perspective. At the top I discovered the place I’d been looking for.

You can find it on a map. The upper Manistee comes nearest to the upper Au Sable there, and a long, low hill divides the two watersheds. If you climb to the crest on the west side you can look out over a densely wooded valley of cedars angling away toward Lake Michigan. Walk a hundred paces to the east side and you have an overview of another valley of cedars that angles gradually east toward Lake Huron.

artwork courtesy of Glenn Wolff

I’d been searching for this spot because I knew that the Au Sable and Manistee formed one of the earliest cross-country routes between lakes Huron and Michigan. Ancient people paddled their bark canoes up one river, portaged the height of land, and descended the other river. Much later, European traders, trappers, and timber cruisers used the same pathway. When the giant pines that grew here were cut down for profit, they were floated down the two rivers to mills on the shores of the big lakes.

The perspective I was seeking was partly historical and partly geological. From a hilltop in spring, before the leaves are out, you can see the land revealed, its muscles, its ribs and shoulder blades, its tendons and sinews as they were when the glaciers departed. Or you can view it as a navigation problem to be solved—is that the shortest route to the river? Or as a place to homestead, a landscape to be painted or photographed, or a resource to be plundered. In the late 1800s a timber speculator named David Ward might have climbed this very hill to scan the surrounding valleys for virgin pines. He found vast stands and laid claim to them—eventually owning 70,000 acres— and established a mill on the upper Manistee that grew into a town. On plat maps it was marked “D. Ward,” which, when spoken aloud, became “Deward,” which is how the ghost town is labeled on maps to this day.

It’s good to now and then climb to a height beneath the sky and take stock of where you are. You can see changes in the land, sense the march of centuries, maybe even get a fresh view of where you are in your life and where you are headed.

That day on the hill between the rivers, with spring bursting around me, my view of the world was softened by distance. I was comfortable up there, surveying the land.

But in the valley of the Manistee I could see a glimpse of silver. Maybe a bend in the river. Maybe a beaver pond churning with feeding trout. Suddenly I lost interest in perspective and wanted simply to catch some fish. I hurried down to the valley and busted my way into the cedar swamp and became happily lost in the short view.

(This essay originally appeared as Jerry’s “Reflections” column in Michigan Blue Magazine, Spring 2015)