They say spring advances fifteen miles a day, the pace of a leisurely walk, which is why I could experience three springs last year. The first was in March, in Ohio, on the shore of Lake Erie’s Maumee Bay, where new grass was sprouting in farmers’ fields and clusters of broad-winged hawks circled overhead in […]

WINTER IS A GREAT TIME FOR NOTICING the little things. Maybe a clump of snow dropping silently from a bough. Maybe a red fox trotting up the driveway. Maybe the shimmering snow crystals called “diamond dust” that sometimes, on very cold days, drift down from a blue sky. For years I’ve been trying to simplify […]

With “What’s Lighting Us Up” I’ve been inviting some of my writer friends to report on any books, music, movies, moments in nature, or life events that have been making them come more alive than usual. Here poet, essayist, and playwright Anne-Marie reflects on a difficult challenge in her life and discovers that there can […]

Many thanks to Grove Atlantic for putting me on their review list (because of my interview with Jim Harrison here). They just sent an advance uncorrected proof of Harrison’s new collection of novellas, The Ancient Mistral, which will be released in March, 2016. The title novella, which poses as memoir, contains this, the best damned […]

…In the morning the cabins were new to us. It was as if we had awakened in a different place altogether. Rain streamed down the windows, and the waters of Agate Harbor were gray and wind-streaked and bordered by rock formations capped with golden tamarack and black spruce. Beyond the mouth of the bay, in […]

I’ve known Sydney Lea for many years, from time spent together at the Bear River Writers Conference and through intermittent correspondence about our shared passions for fishing, birds, bird hunting, and books. Syd’s a wonderful poet and essayist, a Pulitzer finalist and a contributor to The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other publications, and […]

Every year on November 10 countless people remember the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in Lake Superior with 29 crewmen on 11/10/75. I remember also November 10, 1998, when I drove to Whitefish Point during one of the worst storms since 1975, saw Lake Superior in turmoil, and met a man who was caught in the […]

Up before dawn this morning full of plans, oh I am industrious, I am such a hard worker, I will never die. Stepped outside to see what kind of day it would be and across the darkness heard a barred owl call from the spruce trees beyond the old barn. That cool hollow inquiry, “Who, […]

ONE DAY LAST FALL we were paddling across a small lake in northern Michigan when my vocabulary failed me. It was a bright October afternoon and the woods were in full display. To say they were “ablaze” with a “riot” of colors would be inadequate. Pathetic, really. I plucked a brown leaf from the water […]

BEACHES TO WALK, rivers to paddle, trails to hike. The pair of red-headed woodpeckers that nested in our yard. Warblers. A red-eyed vireo laboring to feed a fledgling cowbird half again its size. Visits from friends and family (everyone wants to visit Traverse City in the summer). Neighbors’ lawn mowers, leaf blowers, chainsaws, chippers. Women’s […]