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 […]

“Writers are greatly respected. The intelligent public is wonderfully patient with them, continues to read them, and endures disappointment after disappointment, waiting to hear from art what it does not hear from theology, philosophy, social theory, and what it cannot hear from pure science. Out of the struggle at the center has come an immense, […]

Alaska’s shotgun divorces are rare here in northern Michigan, but our fever can still take alarming forms. Now that we’ve passed February and begun the brutal home stretch, my friends and neighbors have begun exhibiting a variety of symptoms: – dragging the canoe into the living room, setting it on sawhorses, and spray-painting it yellow. […]

I’ve been studying the history of taxonomy lately and reading Aristotle, Pliny, Linnaeus, and others who have labored mightily to make order in the universe. But no study of the systems of classification would be complete without mentioning the Jorge Luis Borges story posing as an essay, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins.” In it […]

Every writer has such a drawer. A repository of miscellaneous fragments, discarded first drafts, odd midnight jottings.  A seed bin. A garden plot starting to sprout. A cabinet of literary curiosities. I have many such drawers. One is an actual drawer. Another is a wire in-box tray  stacked high with hand-written and printed pages stratified […]

As the North digs out from last night’s blizzard, maybe it’s a good time to share an excerpt from It’s Raining Frogs and Fishes about the mega-storm of 1888 and the rather obscure origins of our word “blizzard”:

Among my greatest pleasures in a long and pleasurable career has been collaborating with artists Glenn Wolff and Chad Pastotnik. Working together in the hemlock and cedar woods along the Cedar River at Chad’s  Deep Wood Press, we’ve done three projects together:  a limited-edition book (Winter Walks) and, now, our second limited-edition broadside. This broadside, […]

I was born on Columbus Day, 1954 and as a child was more than willing to accept the conventional hero stories of that era. Later, when my friends and I were old enough to  read objectively and think for ourselves, many of us became appalled, as are countless others, by the real story of Columbus: […]

When I was a kid I liked fall best, October especially, month of my birth, of crisp nights and colored leaves, of Halloween and apple cider and firewood to be split and stacked before winter. Summer was trivial, made for children and tourists, but autumn was somber, solemn, mature. It made me impatient to grow […]

On the “make lemonade” premise I considered writing a diet book, one that was sure to hurl to the top of bestseller lists. It would be titled:  Lose 10 Pounds in 8 Hours! The Contaminated Food Diet! Instead I’m content to live the rest of my life with an abnormal fear of turkey-and-hummus  roll-ups left […]