Category Archives: Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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Former Luddite Goes Cyber; Sort of Likes It

With two new websites, an electronic newsletter, and a Facebook page churning away via mysterious processes it seems I’ve parachuted into a futuristic cyber age powered by steam engines and magic. What’s next, a Tweeter account?

Yes, if the wizards at Chelsea Bay Design and Maue Design have their way. In recent months Chelsea and Jon have used trickery and perhaps hypnosis to nudge me in directions that seem suspiciously close to what my friends and I used to refer to sneeringly as “self promotion.” We didn’t say those words, we hissed them. Sometimes we spit them out with righteous force. Promoting oneself was what politicians did. It was undignified. It reeked of ego. It was driven by terrible greed.

Besides, “marketing” is what the publicity department gets paid to do. They do it so we authors don’t have to get our hands icky. It works nicely that way. We go on book tour and promote the crap out of our book and tell everyone we have no choice in the matter. It’s in the contract. And the evil publicist is cracking the whip. Do you think we would go on all those radio talk shows and drink beer until three in the morning with Jon Stewart if we didn’t have to?

But times have changed. The publicity department’s budget got slashed again. Or so they claim. The truth is, according to my friend Wally, who’s better informed than I, Publicity is under orders from The Suits to promote only authors who are already billionaires. The rest of us, the mere millionaires and ten-millionaires, are lowly “midlist authors.” That was once an honorable category. The frontlist made most of the money, but the midlist was where all the interesting books were found. If you couldn’t be rich, at least you could be respected.

Now we’ve lost even the respect. Back in the day, when we walked into the offices of HarperCollins the staff came running with champagne and caviar and unrolled a purple velvet runner so our shoes wouldn’t have to touch the carpet. Now everyone stampedes screaming from the building. Wally says it’s like we’ve come down with a literary form of leprosy. Or worse. It might be as bad as Proteus Syndrome. It could even rival Epidermodysplasia Verruciformis. (OMG, don’t look it up. It’s hideous.)

So that’s why I’m here, in this strange new world with its many powerful gadgets. I’d rather be crafting deathless prose in my tower, surrounded by fans camped on the plains as far as I can see, waiting breathlessly for the next typewritten page to glide from my window. Those days are over, alas. But I’m okay with it. Kind of relieved, even. I was getting tired of autographing women’s breasts and endorsing all those royalty checks (talk about writer’s cramp!). And I was real damned tired of composing my books on the same manual Royal my parents gave me when I graduated from high school. This Commodore PET is amazing. Can you believe it? It can store an entire book – nearly 300 pages! – on only ten floppy disks.

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The Moment When a Book is Born

Sometimes you can pinpoint the moment exactly.

Glenn Wolff and I remember the genesis of our first collaboration, It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes, which was originally published in 1992. It began when our mutual friend, the artist Bernie Knox, grabbed me by the arm and pulled me to the telephone in her house. She placed the receiver in my hand and said, “Say hello to Glenn Wolff. He just moved back from New York. You guys need to meet.” Of course I knew who Glenn was. We were a year apart in high school, where he was the star of the art department, and for years I’d been enjoying his illustrations in the New York Times and elsewhere. Lately our work had begun showing up at the same time in Sports Afield and a few other magazines. I remember saying something like, “Hi Glenn. I guess we’d better have lunch.”

During that lunch, at Stacey’s Restaurant in downtown Traverse City, Michigan, we began to brainstorm and during the next couple hours outlined an idea for a series of books about wonders of nature. Glenn still has those original notes and sketches (see below). We decided to begin the series with wonders of the sky, with water and earth to follow, and over the next few days began developing the idea and outlining chapters. Next we arranged a meeting with a literary agent and made the pitch to her. With her encouragement we wrote a proposal and a sample chapter with illustrations. Then we sat back to see what would happen.

What happened exceeded our wildest dreams. The book went to auction, with three major publishers bidding on it. We chose HarperCollins, flew to New York to meet our editor, the wonderful Hugh Van Dusen, and the rest of the Harper team, then dove in and worked closely with copy editors, designers, and publicists to launch the book into the world. It went on to become a national bestseller (though it never quite cracked the top ten of the Times list). It was “the surprise hit” at the Frankfurt Book Fair, according to Hugh Van Dusen, who told us that the Japanese delegation stayed up all night to read it and made a generous offer for translation rights the next morning; in time it was translated into Japanese, Chinese, German, Portuguese, and Czech. It was a main selection of the Nature Society Book Club (who paired it with my next book, A Place on the Water, on the inside front cover of their monthly newsletter). It was featured on a wild and wildly popular Japanese game show that flashed the word “Power!” on the screen every time an amazing fact was quoted from the book — making that expression a permanent part of my family’s lexicon.

Now, after all these years, we’ve produced an updated edition, available now as an ebook, with a paperback coming soon. And today Barnes and Noble is featuring it as a Nook First and promoting it across an array of platforms in the e-world. It’s enough to make a father blush with pride.

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GETTING LOST

Here’s what turns my crank: Free-flowing rivers in wild country, ponds hidden in tamarack swamps, campsites under white pines swaying in a breeze, trout gulping mayflies. I like pushing off in a canoe. I like slinging a backpack onto my shoulders. I like knowing that if I find a woods or a pond or a stretch of river that suits me I can stay put for a few days or a week. And I like going my own way, at my own pace, and stumbling upon beautiful and interesting places.

So of course I like Michigan. After a lifetime of exploring it, my appreciation just keeps growing.

For one thing, we’re never more than a few miles from water here. And with so much of the two peninsulas protected by state and national forests there are thousands of miles of two-track roads and hiking trails to explore. The opportunities for adventure are endless, and you don’t need to go far to find it.

On summer weekends Gail and I like to throw some gear in the back of the car, strap our canoe to the racks, and head for the woods. We take our time and drive the trails slowly, with the windows open, so we can spot berry bushes and smell sweet fern and more easily catch glints of water through the trees. On the seat between us we keep a county map-book open so we can make notes in the margins – “Good bluegill lake,” “Grouse cover along this creek,” “Lots of blueberries here, 2009.”

In a radius of fifty miles from our home are more streams, lakes, and ponds – and more forests, swamps, bogs, and dunes — than anyone could explore in a lifetime. There are birds and wildflowers to study, fish to catch, berries and mushrooms to gather. Meandering trails will lead us to them, and they can get us happily lost, too.

And isn’t that the point? Get lost, so we can discover new places. Get lost, so we can forget about work and money worries and the latest political scandal. Get lost, so we can learn more about the places we love – and maybe learn a little more about ourselves, as well.

[Originally published in Michigan Blue Magazine, special Adventure Travel edition, summer 2012.]

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The Best Thing I Read Today

“It is possible at last for Masa and me to imagine a little of what the ancient – archaic — mind and life of Japan were. And to see what could be restored to the life today. A lot of it is simply in being aware of clouds and wind.”

– Gary Snyder, final lines of Earth House Hold

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On the Eve of the Opening of Trout Season 2013

“I don’t know why I need to fish so much. For the good of my soul? The question makes me skittish. I prefer to think of fishing as a restorative to some vital thing — maybe soul, maybe heart, maybe vitality itself – that dwindles when we spend too much time working, attending to family and fiscal emergencies, driving in traffic, and watching television. I don’t know much about the soul, but I know that the twin benefits of fishing – the combination of physical activity with cerebral engagement — serve to flush impurities from my system. When I haven’t been out for a few days I suffer from a buildup of hideous poisons. My joints ache. My muscles cramp. My fingernails get brittle. If I sleep, I dream of forest fires and exploding trains. Tears stream down my cheeks, leaving trails of toxic salts. I pace the floor and sigh until Gail kicks me out of the house, which is all I needed in the first place.”

– From “Simplify, Simplify,” in The River Home, by Jerry Dennis

A Cure for Writer’s Block

Writer’s block is your body’s way of telling you to go fishing*.

But if you’re in a northern latitude in March and it’s 19 degrees outside and the wind is gusting at 25 mph and snowdrifts are thigh-deep across your driveway, your body is telling you to cook. So pour a glass of wine, turn up the music, and get at it.

Yesterday’s cure: Spring Fever Chicken and Bean Soup

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Place a pound of dry northern beans in a cast-iron kettle and cover with water an inch or so above the beans. Cover with a loose lid and place in center of oven. Cook for one hour.

Brown a pound or more of chicken thighs (or breasts; but thighs are better) in a tablespoon of olive oil. Add as much chopped garlic as you’re comfortable with, then add fifty percent more. Stir frequently to prevent garlic from burning. When cooked through dice or shred the chicken and set aside.

Chop onions, carrots, celery, and any favorite vegetables. Heat a tablespoon of olive oil in a large soup kettle and add chopped veggies. Saute until the carrots begin to soften.

Add small mountain of rough-chopped kale or spinach, stems and all. Saute until the greens shrink down and soften. (If necessary add a quarter cup of water or chicken broth to keep veggies from burning.)

Add 32 oz of chicken broth, crushed or diced tomatoes (with liquid), and the chicken. Bring to soft boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 10 to 20 minutes.

Add beans. Cover and simmer 20 to 30 minutes or until perfect.

Serve with grated cheddar and fresh cilantro or parsley to defeat scurvy. Add salt and pepper to taste and a dash of your favorite hot sauce. You want your tongue to shout, “I’m alive!”

Serve with red wine or hearty beer and a loaf of artisan bread. Enjoy the adoration of your loves ones.

After dinner retire to a comfortable chair or couch and read something beautiful for two hours. Go to bed early. Dream of tropical birds and waterfalls.

In the morning, presto! Writer’s block cured.

*or go skiing, snowshoeing, hunting, kayaking, photographing, dancing, or searching for lost civilizations. My body usually wants to fish.

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