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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.)

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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?

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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.

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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.

It 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.

By 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.

Hard 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 disappeared. 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.

12/14 — 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.

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?